aespa have released “Santa Baby” as a digital single that keeps Eartha Kitt’s original vocal take and threads new parts from Karina, Giselle, Winter and Ningning around it. This is not a cover. It is a studio-built duet between a K-pop group with a global streaming base and a singer who has been dead for almost two decades, and it comes from the music company that took control of her catalog this year.

The choice of song explains the bet. Kitt’s “Santa Baby” is one of the few pre-rock Christmas records that still return to the Billboard charts in the holiday season, and Primary Wave Music, which partnered with her estate, says the track is close to half a billion plays on Spotify alone. Pairing that recording with aespa is a wager that the song’s next audience will find Kitt through a group they already follow, not through a holiday playlist they inherited.

The original was cut in the early Fifties with Henri René and His Orchestra, written by Joan Javits and Philip Springer as a tongue-in-cheek wish list of sables, yachts and decorations from Tiffany. The new version runs just under three minutes and was released as a single track under the Primary Wave Music IV label. aespa have reworked an older song before: their “Dreams Come True” re-recorded a late-Nineties S.E.S. hit for SM Entertainment’s Remastering Project. The members say this one was personal. “All four of us have always enjoyed listening to Eartha Kitt’s original during the holiday season, so getting to bring our own touch to it was a really special experience,” the group said in the release statement.

The business behind it is plain. Primary Wave’s deal with the estate and Kitt’s daughter, Kitt Shapiro, covers the music catalog and her name, image and likeness rights. The publisher, whose portfolio already includes rights tied to Prince, Whitney Houston and Bob Marley, has every reason to make its most streamed Kitt recording work harder in a new market.

That is where the doubts start. Kitt cannot approve a duet built from her vocal, and her own history with the song suggests she was particular about who stood next to it: she disliked Madonna’s association with the track, even though critics credited Madonna’s cover with reviving it. Shapiro, the executor of her estate, offers the only endorsement on record. “I think she would be absolutely delighted to hear her voice alongside the talented women of aespa,” she said. It is a daughter’s reasonable guess, made by a partner in the deal. The release also arrives with audio only, no new music video, into the most crowded month of the year for seasonal music.

The single came out on all major streaming platforms on November 13, 2026, and opens a year-long celebration leading to Kitt’s centenary. Kitt recorded the original in October 1953. She was born on January 17, 1927, in North, South Carolina, and died on December 25, 2008, at 81. aespa take the European leg of their SYNK : COMPLæXITY tour to nine cities after runs in Asia, Latin America and North America: Manchester’s AO Arena on January 14, The O2 in London on January 16, then Amsterdam, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin, Milan and Barcelona before closing at the Accor Arena in Paris on February 2. No further Asian or Latin American dates are part of this leg.

The London show falls on the eve of what would have been Kitt’s 100th birthday, and the four voices singing her song that night will belong to a group she never heard.

Tags: K-pop, aespa, Christmas music, Eartha Kitt, Primary Wave, Santa Baby