Brussels K-Pop challenge: Can five girls be performance ready in 24 hours?

Brussels is the stage for a novel K-Pop challenge that calls on five teenagers to launch themselves as a new girl group in 24 hours.

The social media experiment kicks off on Friday morning with a team of K-Pop choreographers and vocal coaches on hand to intensively training the group as they are filmed in portrait mode on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

While K-Pop stars like globally-acclaimed BTS and Blackpink undergo years of hothouse drilling before their debut, these five youngsters will have to perform an original song with the equivalent of just one day of coaching.

The girls receive the training sessions over a number of days and are also expected to practice at home. As soon as they’ve completed the 24 hours of coaching, they will head straight into the studio to record the new single before filming the music video.

The project by Idol Academy is the brainchild of Brussels communications professional Dennis Landsbert-Noon. He is no stranger to the world of K-Pop as his son Blaise is a member of British boyband dearALICE which was formed in 2024 by the BBC TV series Made In Korea: The K-Pop Experience.

“Idol Academy is exciting and different in two crucial ways,” he says. “First, it’s a reality series designed specifically for the social media era. And second, everyone involved is adamant that the narrative tension of this new series will not be underpinned by any cruelty or humiliation, which can sometimes be the case in other reality series – and indeed on social media more generally.”

The five teenagers participating in the challenge are Alya (18), Jihye (18), Julia (17), Kali (18) and Luna (16), pictured above. Representing nine nationalities, they reflect both Brussels’ multicultural identity and the K-Pop genre’s international reach.

Although Belgium has been a little slow to embrace some aspects of Hallyu, the global wave of  Korean culture, K-Pop is becoming increasingly popular, particularly among younger generations.

Its social media engagement reaches trillions of interactions worldwide. On YouTube alone, K-Pop songs have clocked up more than 1.2 trillion total views, with explosive year-over-year increases, according to Idol Academy.

As the impact of BTS’ recent visit to Brussels highlights, global K-Pop sparks not only an economic boom, but also a cultural one. It is difficult to imagine the future of pop music without the far-reaching influence of South Korea.

Follow the challenge from 10 July: @idol.academy.2026 (TikTok), idolacademy_2026 (Instagram) and @IdolAcademy2026 (YouTube)

Photos: ©Cathy Cunliffe Photography