The 12-member K-pop unit scored its first pop radio hit with “Star,” thanks to an intensive, years-long strategy.

LOONA member Yves didn’t believe it at first when the K-pop girl group debuted on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart last month with its snappy synth-pop single, “Star.”“It sometimes feels unrealistic,” she says over Zoom from a conference room in Seoul. Reality will sink in, she believes, when she and LOONA’s 11 other members can all travel safely to the United States and hear it on the radio for themselves.

Only a handful of Korean acts have experienced that singular thrill. Despite K-pop’s strong physical sales, booming streaming numbers and titanic influence on social media (LOONA alone has 1.6 million Instagram followers), it has long struggled to gain traction on American radio, an institution that doesn’t play a lot of non-English pop songs. So Korean artists looking to break through on U.S. airwaves typically adapt to the market with strategic label partnerships, Western collaborations, and English-language singles — and LOONA has adopted the lattermost option with “Star.”

Before LOONA ever attempted to cross over, though, the group — whose members range in age from 18 to 24 — promoted each member individually before debuting as a 12-member unit under its Korean management company, BlockberryCreative. In an atypical move, the members of LOONA were announced over a two-year period: each month, a new face was revealed to the public — hence its Korean name, 이달의 소녀, which translates to “girl of the month” — along with a solo single. Throughout this ambitious pre-debut process, three official subunits were formed (1/3, ODD EYE CIRCLE, yyxy), and an elaborate fandom was created called the LOONAverse.

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