NiziU flips Aesop’s fox fable in ‘Sour Grapes’, its first Korean mini album

NiziU has released “Sour Grapes”, its first Korean mini album, and the title track argues with Aesop. In the old fable the fox gives up on grapes it cannot reach and calls them sour; NiziU’s version, as JYP Entertainment describes it, goes after the prize harder the more everyone else hesitates. The five-track EP is the most sustained push into the Korean market the Japanese group has made since it came out of the Nizi Project audition series.

The stakes are about geography. NiziU has been a Japanese act first and a Korean one only occasionally: before this EP, its Korean catalogue amounted to two singles, “Press Play” and “Love Line”, with a year and a half of silence after the second. Japan, meanwhile, has given the group its biggest year. Its second Japanese EP, “GOOD GIRL BUT NOT FOR YOU”, topped the Oricon chart, the best-of album “Portfolio” was certified Gold, and the NiziU: THE CINEMA tour took it to Kyocera Dome Osaka and Tokyo Dome. “Sour Grapes” tests whether that weight travels across the strait.

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The members frame it as a physical break with their past. “The dance moves for the title track ‘Sour Grapes’ are something that our group has not tried before. After our first dance practice, our muscles were sore all over,” Ayaka told Korea JoongAng Daily. The choreography leans on bigger, harder movements, and the chorus carries a hand gesture that draws a bunch of grapes in the air. The video, shot in Taipei, sets the group on a night street crowded with foxes.

The rest of the EP is pitched as a set of linked fairy tales. “Petal’s Song”, “emoji”, “Into the Dawn” (새벽을 달려 in Korean) and “Lullaby” follow the title track, each reworking a familiar emotion from the group’s point of view, and JYP previewed the last two with a track video and a live-clip teaser rather than holding everything for release day.

For Riku, the shift belongs to a year of taking more control. “This year has been all about taking on new ‘challenges.’ We organized the set list by ourselves for our dome tour in Japan, and now we are returning with an intense concept that our group has not done before,” Riku said.

The numbers so far argue for patience rather than triumph. The music video passed seven million views on JYP’s official channel within its first three days, a respectable start for a label with one of K-pop’s largest YouTube audiences, but Last.fm, which leans towards Western listeners, had logged only about 600 listeners for the EP by midweek. A harder, more intense concept is also a familiar reset button for groups trying to recalibrate, and an Aesop reference alone will not separate NiziU from a crowded release calendar. What the Korean market has not yet seen is a NiziU record that stays in the conversation past launch week.

“Sour Grapes” arrived on September 28 at 6 p.m. Korean time, eighteen months after “Love Line” in March 2025 and almost three years after the group’s Korean debut with “Press Play” in October 2023. NiziU debuted in Japan in 2020 with “Step and a step”, at the end of the audition show co-run by JYP and Sony Music Japan.

In Aesop, the fox walks away and saves face. NiziU has built a dome-level career at home and could have done the same with Korea; this EP is the group deciding the grapes are still worth the jump.

Tags: K-pop, J-pop, JYP Entertainment, Nizi Project, NiziU, Sour Grapes

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