How JAE KIM Is Creating His Own Brand of K-Pop

A lifelong fan of K-Pop, the Toronto-based musician is capturing viewers attention on TikTok and creating cathartic music that blends pop and R&B.

JAE KIM feels like time is moving too fast these days.

It was only a year ago that he graduated from university but his time there, he told me recently from his home in Toronto, flashed by faster than he ever imagined. “I remember graduating and I wasn’t prepared to just be done already,” he said. So, in the last few months Jae has done what he is becoming best known for to cope with change: He’s made music. 

This week Jae’s latest single “Blue” arrived on streaming services and tracks this strange, uncertain time the singer-songwriter finds himself in. “I wrote the song when I was pretty depressed. I was dealing with a lot of feelings about time passing too fast and how I’m growing up too fast,” he explained with a soft voice. “There’s a lot I want to do and I feel like I don’t have enough time for it.” 

The song, which resembles the melancholy Korean ballads from the early 2000s, displays why Jae is such a comforting artist to listen to. Purely on surface value, lyrics like “You make me feel so blue/ You make me wanna run back to you” might sound directed at a lover. But Jae, who prefers to use ambiguity in his music, actually wrote the song to himself. “The motif is that I feel really blue right now because of you, which is directed at myself,” he said. “I miss when I was a child because I didn’t know how good I had it.”

Jae is a lifelong fan of K-Pop, which is why songs like IU’s “Autumn Morning” or Lamp’s “Rainy Tapestry” infuse so naturally into “Blue”. But if you only knew Jae from his music, you might be surprised that on TikTok, where he’s amassed nearly 1 million followers, Jae nails dance challenges for trending K-Pop songs. Note, for example, how he crushes the VIVZ’s “Maniac” challenge or how, in one of his funniest challenges, he freezes midway through DPR IAN’s “Don’t Go Insane”. His moves are precise and sharp but he also seems to be in on the fact that, yeah, this can be funny to watch.

But Jae is most compelling as a storyteller. Take, for example, a funny story he shared recently on TikTok about the time his mother questioned him over why he’s constantly filming videos. “You’re always saying, ‘I’m filming something’ or ‘I’m recording’ but what are you actually recording?” He covers his mouth, imitating his mother’s concern. “It can’t be,” he says, taking a deep gulp. “Prostitute?” When I asked him about this he laughed because he actually never told his parents that he makes music. They found out after his father saw a thumbnail for his music video “In June” on YouTube.  

“He clicked on it because he thought it was me in the thumbnail,” he said dryly, “which it was.” 

Jae’s mom once told her son that she knew exactly when he developed a love for music. “My mom told me when I was younger, like four or five years old, whenever music would come on that I liked, I would shake my butt,” he said with a laugh. “I like to think that subconsciously is when my interest in music began.”

Jae grew up in the suburbs of Richmond Hills, an hour’s drive away from Toronto. “I think everybody who lives here says they're from Toronto, but they’re from different towns,” he said with a smile. Although Toronto has a large Asian community, Jae stuck out from the kids whose families were second generation immigrants because they had largely already adapted the customs of the West. “I got picked on a lot because K-Pop, manga, and Asian culture weren't very popular back then,” he said. “And because I grew up very Korean I looked very Korean, instead of Korean Canadian, which is very Westernized.”

Growing up in a Korean household meant that Jae missed American pop culture touchstones, something that he’s reminded of even today. Recently when a friend played a Lady Gaga song, Jae confessed that he had never heard of it. “You don’t know what song this is,” they asked him incredulously. “Yeah,” Jae replied. “I didn’t listen to this when I was younger.” 

Instead, Jae spent his childhood listening to Korean pop music or, as many North Americans call it, K-Pop. “I think my friends who I’ve grown up with always say K-Pop,” he said. “But to me it hasn’t been K-Pop because it was my only source of music. So it was like what you guys would refer to as pop, right? But K-Pop never had its own section in my head.”

Growing up in a Korean household, too, meant that Jae became fluent in two languages at a very young age. “I don’t remember at all not being fluent in English. I think I was very fortunate because when I was younger I didn’t realize the importance of learning a language. Obviously, as you get older, it gets harder, too,” he said. “But I had the benefit of speaking Korean at home and being completely fluent in it, and then at school, because you’re intaking so much and learning languages is so easy when you’re young, I didn’t have any issues learning English.” 

In school, Jae learned to play several orchestral instruments with the voraciousness that one might binge a series on Netflix. Within five years, he had mastered the flute, bassoon, trumpet, piano, and baritone. But Jae had never considered pursuing singing professionally. “ I had always liked to sing, but since growing up I had only played instruments,” he said, “I never thought about the possibility of doing vocal focused music.”

This changed when he found LeeHi, a Korean singer whose voice and lyrics inspired him to give singing a real try. In 2020, as the pandemic shut down the world and pushed everyone inside, Jae had nothing but free time to focus on making music.“Something came over me during Covid and I realized that life is so short. Covid is happening so even if I do something and it fails no one is gonna see me because I don’t go outside,” he said referencing the lockdowns. “I think that’s what gave me the courage to start.”

“I think because everything shut down, I was forced to spend a lot of time with myself and figure out a lot about me as a person,” he said. “I’m still working on that but I definitely feel like a lot of who I am today was shaped during Covid.” But then something interesting happened: People responded to his content. When Jae posted his first dance cover on TikTok, it quickly went viral. “That gave me the courage to continue,” he said. Maybe, he thought, I’m onto something. 

Jae then turned to music. He began by sampling KATIE KIM’s “Love Kills”, a slow burn ballad about toxic love. “I actually wrote my song over her instrumental for her song ‘Love Kills’,” he said. “I was really worried because I was writing it to the instrumental and I wondered if it would sound the same.” But as he began working on the production of the song with his friend, Jae realized that he had his own, dynamic song. “She’s such a big part of my artist direction,” he added.

Although Jae was only eighteen years old when he released “Love Kills”, the song is one of the most solid debuts of anyone his age. While the track has traditionale elements of R&B, there’s also influences of jazz and alt-pop. But the song coasts thanks to Jae’s charismatic vocals and delivery. 

Within its first year of streaming, “Love Kills” gained over 300,000 listeners. “I wasn’t aware that is a very big number for someone with very little support,” he explained. “But it was just so shocking to me because I arguably put in the least amount of time promoting.” Today the song sits as his third most popular song on Spotify. 

“It shows,” he added, “how lucky and driven I was at the time.”

What happened next isn’t an overnight success story, but one where Jae began to find his sound. For a time, he tried imitating the sound of Keshi, whose lo-fi tracks were beginning to blow up streaming. But after releasing “In June”, a track arguably brighter than anything in Keshi’s discography, Jae started to reconsider the direction he was going in. That year he released an EP titled “Weekend” with two dueling tracks: The title song, which is one of the simplest structured songs in Jae’s discography, and “Come Over”, a darker, moodier track. “I wanted to test out the waters and see what people think about two different songs that are such different genres,” he said. 

When he found Yerin Baek, Jae began to see a new lane for himself. “Her music made me feel like I was in a movie and that I wasn't in the real world for three minutes,” he said. He realized then that he had found his new direction. “I didn’t want to make music that is played in a club or a rave. I wanted to make music that takes you away from the real world and makes you feel like a main character in a movie.” That,  Jae said, is when he really began “to lean into my style.” 

His music is as comforting as it is smooth. Often Jae’s voice glides across a beat as he sings in a mixture of Korean and English, something that he told me often comes down to which word sounds best on a rhythm. But he’s learned that Korean helps create ambiguity in his lyrics. “There’s a lot of vagueness in my music, especially in Korean, where a particular line could be applicable to first or third person because there’s no pronoun in it,” he said. 

“With lyrics, I usually go for a certain theme,” he told me. Often, concepts about loneliness splinter into the lyrics. When he wrote “Waiting in the Summer Rain”, he explained to me, Jae grappled with how he always felt like the second choice in friendships. But then, in an effort to make the song more universal, he wrote the lyrics directed towards a lover. “That way even if you’re going through a love issue or a platonic issue, you could relate to it,” he said. “I try to generalize my lyrics as much as possible.” 

At the heart of Jae’s music is a desire to comfort his listeners, to take them out of their lives for three minutes and remind them they’re not alone with what they’re feeling.  He’s also proof that you don’t have to be the most talkative or outgoing person in the room to succeed. “I want to try to be successful so that I can tell myself that you don’t need to be super extroverted to succeed,” he said. 

Maybe, I tell him, that is why people are so drawn to him. Jae’s not trying to be the coolest person in the room. He’s just trying to be himself. 

But for a few years, Jae didn’t feel like he had enough success to consider himself a real artist. “I think it took me a really long time to even consider myself an artist. I always felt like I needed to reach some sort of status. Not like BTS’ level, but I needed some sort of reputation to call myself an artist,” he said. But as he began meeting other musicians and content creators who took so much pride in their work, he wondered what was holding him back. “It would be a disservice to myself to not call myself an artist,” he said, “even if I don’t necessarily have the success I'm looking towards.” 

This brings Jae back to “Blue” because to not let all of the possibilities with music and viral numbers overwhelm him, he’s had to be okay with just living in the moment. “The ending of the song talks about acceptance because I think I am a very optimistic person. When I get into a depressive episode I try to rationalize it,” he said. “There are things I would never experience if I never grew up. I like to tell myself, yes, I may miss my childhood but in a  few years I’m gonna miss this exact stage of life too. I try to be positive and grateful for everything I'm going to do now.” 

When he thinks about it, he still can’t quite believe that he’s chosen this kind of career. The people who Jae grew up with have often told him that he’s the last person they’d pick to be a public figure. But that kind of response is often satisfying to Jae. Maybe they didn’t know him that well, or maybe, it just proves that he’s growing. 

“I think when I was younger I would have never imagined that I could do stuff like this,” he assessed. “I feel like little me would not think that I would be doing something that is so extroverted.” 

“Blue” is as much about younger Jae as it is about the race Jae feels to size himself up to others. “I think one thing that I would like to tell my little self is that I struggle a lot right now with feeling so old,” he said. “There’s so many people out there who are way more successful and younger than me.”

But something Jae’s learned is that the moments he’s experiencing right now will one day become nostalgia too. One day he’ll miss the stories he’s writing and the memories he’s making right now at 22. That, he said, makes him eager to embrace the present. “I may miss my childhood but in a  few years I’m gonna miss this exact stage of life too,” he said. “So, I try to be positive and grateful for everything I'm going to do now.”

He paused as he thought about this for a moment before he continued. “But I would like to tell myself that there is so much more to look forward to and there is so much stuff that could happen in the next four or five years,” he said. For a moment,he looked lost in thought. “I don’t even know what could happen this year. I mean, I feel like a lot is changing for me just this year. So it’s always good to look towards the future. Just try your best,” he added with the wisdom that he’s seen what could happen next before, “because you never know where you’ll end up.”