By Catherine Shin
When JYP Entertainment's experimental subsidiary INNIT Entertainment introduced dodree in January 2026, it was clear the label wasn't chasing a conventional girl-group blueprint. The duo – made up of Na Yeongjoo, a trained pansori vocalist (also known as traditional lyrical opera), and Lee Songhyun, a Korean dance major – emerged from the KBS2 audition program "THE DDANDDARA," hosted by J.Y. Park.
Both members came up through traditional Korean arts rather than the standard idol pipeline, and that background is the entire premise of the group.
"Dodree" fuses ‘도드리’ (pronounced as dodeuri), a term for a six-beat rhythmic cycle in traditional Korean music, with "free", which serves as the duo’s drive to outgrow genre categories and move toward a global stage, while staying within the foundations of translating sorrowful melodies into hope and optimism.
dodree calls their sound "K-rossover Pop," a dual label that reflects the group’s mission statement: the preservation of Korean musical identity with the willingness to experiment freely across styles.
The duo’s January 2026 debut single, "Just Like a Dream", provided a visual for the listener, as if they were longing for someone who is no longer in their lives, like paths crossing for a fleeting moment. “This is how we felt when debuting our crossover pop genre.
It compares past love with the dream, contrasting cold reality and warm memories.” Songhyun told Koreanet in a video interview.
The cinematic pop is structured around traditional vocal ornamentation, with choreography drawing from traditional dance's ‘line-drawing’ movement vocabulary and stage outfits built around the chima, a traditional skirt reworked for a modern silhouette.
The duo's comeback "HAWWAH," released June 24 following the pre-release track "Lilac" on June 17, pushes the concept further. "Lilac" pairs a trap beat with gayageum and other traditional instrumentation, and its chorus elegantly reworks the melody of the Korean children's song "Ongdalsaem" (which translates to ‘Little Spring’) into new lyrics about the early, ambiguous stage of flirtation and attraction.
Borrowing a melody most Korean listeners already know from childhood and re-contextualizing it as a love song provides the track with an emotional shorthand that a wholly original melody wouldn't carry as well.
Building on the original melody, "HAWWAH" uses the metaphor of being pulled into the summer heat, tracking the shift from a quiet crush into something closer to obsession, relying heavily on the gayageum riffs against dreamy synths and dance-forward production.
The preview also matched the music's ambition. The trailer, Five Directions: Motion of Summer, moved through the interiors of traditional Korean houses, folding screens, and dancheong (traditional Korean decorative coloring found on historic buildings and artifacts). Instead of translating these references for a wider audience or diluting their significance, the promotional material trusts viewers to engage with them as they are.
Two singles in, dodree already reads as a high distinction within JYP's portfolio. They’re not a hybrid act softened for mass appeal, but one built specifically to build a bridge between traditional Korean music and contemporary pop structure.
It also raises the open question hanging over the "K-rossover" premise: how far can a concept go at this specific level?
JYP isn't alone in testing whether traditional Korean music can carry a modern idol act. SM Entertainment's MYTRO, a trot-focused boy group formed through TV Chosun's "Falling for a Trot-dol," is the clearest recent parallel, and also a cautionary one. After a high-profile launch process in 2024, MYTRO's social accounts and web presence were quietly taken down in mid-2025, with the group now widely considered inactive.
But elsewhere, the appetite for this crossover clearly exists: BIGBANG's Daesung brought his own trot material to Coachella in April 2026, performing entirely in Korean without translated subtitles and drawing a strong reaction from an audience with no prior context for the genre.
dodree is attempting exactly that, on the JYP infrastructure that Coachella-adjacent artists don't need and MYTRO didn't have. Whether "K-rossover Pop" becomes a sustainable lane or a striking but short-lived experiment is still an open question. But two singles in, the label seems willing to keep making waves in the scene with confidence.