Roy Kim

A purveyor of plaintive, acoustic folk-pop, South Korean artist Roy Kim is the winner of Mnet’s TV talent show Superstar K4, which aired in 2012. In subsequent years, he achieved three Korean Top 10 albums — 2013′s Love Love Love, 2014′s Home and 2015′s The Great Dipper — as well as two number one solo singles, 2013′s infectious “Bom Bom Bom” and 2018′s “The Hardest Part.” Much of this success came in Korea while he simultaneously studied for a sociology degree at Georgetown University, Washington D.C. By 2023, while still in his twenties, he had sold over 12 million digital downloads.
He was born Kim Sang-woo, in Seoul, in 1993. His mother was an artist, his father an executive for a liquor manufacturing company. His cousin, Jung Yoon-Hye, eventually became a member of the K-Pop act, Rainbow, before pursuing an acting career. After attending Kyung Bok Elementary School and Whimoon Middle School, Kim’s parents sent him away to study at Asheville School, North Carolina in the U.S. from where he graduated in 2012. He was a keen student, who embraced soccer and swimming, but he dropped those activities towards the end of his school days to purely focus on music. On leaving there, a successful audition in Seoul resulted in him being selected — from 2 million applicants — to compete on TV’s Superstar K4. Early in the series, he covered Lee-Mi-Ki’s “Becoming Dust,” in collaboration with Jung Joon-young. Their rock rendition of the ballad reached number one in Korea, when issued as a single. The pair’s version of Radiohead’s “Creep” didn’t fare so well but, before the end of the show’s run, Kim achieved two further solo Top 10 hits, with covers of Lee Moon-se’s “Whistle” and Yoon Gun’s “October Rain.” His winner’s single, the self-penned “Passing By,” also hit the Top 10 towards the end of 2012. Kim’s success resulted in a significant uptick in video views of his pre-fame performances, hosted by Asheville School.
Early 2013 saw Kim co-present his first radio shows, a vocation to which he would sporadically return over the next three years. That same year, he began a deferred degree at Georgetown University, before releasing his debut album, Love Love Love, in June. The record, and its associated singles, helped Kim to be named Best New Artist at the Mnet Asian Music Awards and Rookie of the Year at the Golden Disc Awards. He enjoyed further success in 2014 with both Home — and its title-track single — hitting the upper reaches of the charts before his theme song to SBS’s Pinocchio TV series won Best Original Soundtrack at 2015′s APAN Star Awards. Additionally, Kim was named Best Foreign Artist at Taiwan’s 2015 Hito Music Awards ahead of that December’s The Great Dipper, which saw him step away from usual acoustic folk sound in favor of piano-based, string-laden ballads. Bookending his mid-2016 appearances as a contestant on King of Mask Singer, Kim enjoyed two Top 20 hits with songs that soundtracked two different tvN series: “Maybe I” from Another Oh Hae-young and “Heaven” (with Kim EZ) from Guardian: The Lonely & Great God.
2017 brought Kim’s Top 10 Blooming Season EP, and 2018 saw the release of two hugely successful singles. “Only Then” was a number two hit which won Best Ballad at the Melon Music Awards, while “The Hardest Part” reached number one. Before the year’s end, he was named Best Male Artist at the Mnet Asian Music Awards. After another single, “All I Do,” featured on tvN’s Romance is a Bonus Book, in 2019, Kim finally graduated from Georgetown. He returned in May 2020 with the piano ballad “Linger On” before being called for an 18-month stint in military service. 2022′s comeback album And. — along with its accompanying singles, “Take Me Back in Time” and “It’ll Be Alright” — failed to match the level of commercial success achieved with his three previous long-playing outings. ~ James Wilkinson