aespa talks about 'Next Level' and their growth as a rookie group Written by Anton Holmes enablePagination: false endIndex: K-pop goes next level with aespa, a recently debuted girl group with their own digital avatars. Photo courtesy of SM ENTERTAINMENT Few K-pop acts and K-dramas have acknowledged or chronicled life in the time of COVID-19 and how we’ve been coping. Most have been content to pretend that no such pandemic exists in their respective universes. In the real world, Koreans have coined the term “untact” — a combination of the negative prefix “un” and the word “contact”— to refer to this moment in our lives. One of the first products of the untact era K-pop is SM Entertainment’s newest girl group aespa (yes, it’s stylized with a small æ).