In June 2024, Red Velvet marked their tenth anniversary with Cosmic, an EP that topped iTunes album charts in 41 regions and earned recognition on Billboard, NME, and Dazed's year-end best-of lists. What followed was two years of silence as a group. On August 3, SM Entertainment confirmed that Red Velvet will return as a full five-member unit with Velvet Summer, a summer mini-album led by the single "Surfin' Boy." The circumstances surrounding this release are meaningfully different from anything the group has faced before.
Why This Comeback Is More Complicated Than the Last
Velvet Summer will be the first full-group release since Wendy and Yeri departed SM Entertainment and signed with new agencies. In K-pop, a member leaving the parent label typically signals the beginning of an uncertain period for group activities — scheduling becomes harder to coordinate, commercial incentives diverge, and the legal framework for a comeback grows considerably more complex. Red Velvet has taken a different approach: maintaining group identity in parallel with individual careers. Over the past two years, each member advanced her own projects. Joy released the solo mini-album From Joy, With Love. Wendy followed with Cerulean Verge. Irene issued her first full-length solo record, Biggest Fan. Seulgi put out Accidentally On Purpose. Yeri concentrated on film and television work. Five members spent two years building out their individual careers — and have now come back together under the same group name.
Looking Back: Career Peak and Most Recent Return
Red Velvet's commercial peak at the single level remains Psycho, released December 23, 2019. Psycho achieved a Certified All-Kill on December 25, simultaneously topping the daily and real-time charts of Melon, Genie, Naver, Bugs, Mnet, Soribada, FLO, and iChart — the first girl group song to achieve a CAK in 2019. It was also the fastest SM Entertainment track to reach ten million streams on Spotify, and accumulated global equivalent sales exceeding 11.3 million units, the group's all-time single record. On Melon's 2020 annual chart, it ranked second among all idol group tracks and first among girl groups — a cross-year performance that demonstrated genuine penetration among general listeners rather than concentrated activity from the fan base alone.
Cosmic (June 2024) told a different story. Cosmic peaked at number 32 on Melon's Top 100 and reached number 11 on the real-time chart, while topping iTunes in 41 regions. The gap in immediate chart impact compared to Psycho cannot be attributed to musical quality alone — it also reflects a significantly more competitive streaming environment. In the same promotional window, NewJeans, aespa, (G)I-DLE, and Kiss of Life all maintained active platform presence, with aespa's Supernova having completed a Perfect All-Kill just weeks earlier in May. The structural conditions that Cosmic entered were fundamentally different from those that greeted Psycho in December 2019, when Red Velvet was the only girl group to reach number one on the Melon daily chart for the entire year.
The Commercial Foundation
Whatever the streaming returns, Red Velvet's physical sales trajectory has been consistently upward. Queendom (2021), Birthday (2022), and Cosmic (2024) each kept the group within the million-unit sales tier — a level of sustained commercial stability that few third-generation acts have maintained into the mid-2020s. On August 1 and 2, Red Velvet will hold a Fan-Con at Korea University's Hwajeong Gymnasium, two days before the album's release — a deliberate move to consolidate fan engagement through live performance before the music reaches streaming platforms.
Red Velvet's Cosmic (2024) peaked at number 32 on the Melon Top 100, while Psycho (2019) achieved an all-kill across all major platforms.
