Inside ‘Neon’: The Visual Team Behind A2O Lite’s Record-Breaking Debut

Two weeks after its release, “Neon” is still everywhere. The debut single from A2O Lite the first girl group from SM Entertainment founder Lee Soo-man since he sold his stake in the label in 202 hit No. 1 on Melon just 29 hours after release, the fastest a rookie act has topped South Korea’s largest streaming chart since 2021. The music video has climbed past 36 million views, and the song has spilled past Korea’s borders, cracking Billboard Japan’s Hot 100, New Zealand’s singles chart, and Apple Music’s global Top 100.

Behind the chart numbers is a deliberately old-fashioned bet: a retro-futurist visual world built by art director Ha Ye-jin and music video director Meltmirror, who spoke to critic Kim Do-heon about how they constructed it.

A Nostalgia for Futures That Never Arrived

Ha’s starting point wasn’t the future it was how the past imagined it. She described drawing on “Gen X Soft Club” aesthetics, the neon-and-chrome visual language of late-1990s and 2000s games and digital interfaces, when technology was cruder but optimism about the future ran wilder. That’s a sharper reference point than it might first appear: it’s the same nostalgia-for-retrofuturism that’s shown up recently in Western pop visuals too, from synthwave album art to the “Y2K revival” aesthetic that’s cycled through fashion and music videos over the past few years. Ha’s goal, she said, was to keep the neon and game-like digital textures from becoming pure decoration they had to sharpen the song’s energy and the members’ presence, not just dress the set.

That tension between spectacle and clarity runs through the whole video. Director Meltmirror previously known for shaping Aespa’s “Whiplash” into a showcase of mechanically precise camera movement said “Neon” demanded a different approach built around “play” rather than rigid choreography-tracking. With the song’s focal member rotating roughly every three seconds, he described constructing the edit like an action film: sharp, deliberate “impact points” timed to the choreography’s tutting-heavy, right-angled movements, which he said lend themselves naturally to punchy, legible cuts.

The Risk Built Into the Retro Bet

The visual nostalgia mirrors a bet the group’s music has already made, and one that’s dividing listeners. “Neon” runs 3 minutes 28 seconds long by current K-pop standards, where songs often stay under three minutes to fit short-form platforms like TikTok and leans on elements more common a decade ago: a cappella passages, high notes, a full dance break, group choreography built for synchronized impact rather than viral fragments. Some critics have called the sound “dated”; others have welcomed it as a deliberate break from formula. Ha and Meltmirror’s design choices read as an attempt to make that throwback structure feel intentional rather than accidental using an aesthetic register (retro digital futurism) that similarly signals “we know exactly what era we’re borrowing from.”

It’s also, inevitably, inviting comparisons the group has barely had time to earn. Because A2O Lite is Lee Soo-man’s first girl group since his split from SM, and because its nine members span South Korea, Japan, China, Thailand and the US, fans and outlets alike have reached for the obvious reference: BLACKPINK, the group that spent a decade becoming the global benchmark for K-pop girl groups, from a Billboard 200 No. 1 album to the highest-grossing tour ever by a female group. Industry observers have been quick to note the comparison is premature — “Neon” hasn’t cracked the main Billboard charts in the US, and A2O Lite has released one single, not an album or a tour. Online, the comparisons so far have mostly been member-to-member Oa to Girls’ Generation’s Jessica, Aijing nicknamed “Baby BoA” rather than group-to-group.

Designing Intimacy Into an Artificial World

The video’s most discussed directorial choice is its ending: after a tightly art-directed sequence built around invented game-like props and hyper-stylized sets, the camera pulls back into what reads as an unstaged garden, with crew visible at the edges of frame and the members lit by daylight rather than production lighting. Ha said the intent was to let the members feel like they’d stepped out of a built world and into the same space as the viewer that stripping away the “completed” image would let their unpolished presence read more clearly. It’s a fairly literal visual argument for authenticity, deployed in service of a group whose selling point, so far, is also its biggest point of scrutiny: several members, including 13-year-old Oa, debuted as minors, which has drawn renewed criticism in Korean media over protections for child performers in the industry a conversation Western coverage of K-pop has grown more attentive to in recent years.

Whether “Neon’s” visual world travels as well as its chart numbers have is still an open question. A2O Lite’s early run has been almost entirely domestic and regional Korea, Japan, Greater China and turning a viral two weeks into the kind of global presence BLACKPINK built over a decade will depend on far more than one music video’s art direction. But as a statement of intent, “Neon” at least makes clear what Ha and Meltmirror were trying to build: a world stylish enough to earn comparisons to K-pop’s biggest acts, and self-aware enough to undercut its own artifice before anyone else could.

Watch the official “NEON” music video: