Ju Hak-nyeon

Ju Hak-nyeon (주학년) first broke through on Produce 101 Season 2 before debuting with THE BOYZ in December 2017. He helped give the group a lighter, more immediately fan-facing energy during its early rise, and that matters because his public value still starts with the catalog he built inside one of fourth-generation K-pop's more durable boy groups.

That catalog stretches from the debut EP The First through later releases such as PHANTASY, Trigger, and Unexpected. Even after the group moved into the ONE HUNDRED Label era, Ju remained part of the performance identity that kept THE BOYZ commercially visible and internationally mobile. The page works best when it centers that body of work instead of reducing him to one scandal cycle.

The legal context still matters. In 2026, Korean reporting shifted attention toward the media process around the prostitution allegations that led to his 2025 exit, with prosecutors indicting the reporter who published the claims after Ju had already been cleared by police. That turn does not erase the rupture with THE BOYZ, but it does change how the story should be framed on HITKULTR. Ju Hak-nyeon remains relevant because both his group catalog and the media-accountability fallout continue to sit inside the wider K-pop conversation.