“I wasn’t brave enough to give up on my career or start something new.

“Our members all felt the emotional burden,” said Kim, 30. They were reduced to performing on army bases, the South Korean equivalent of a daytime appearance on a side stage at a music festival.

Their five singles and two mini-albums were misses rather than hits, and departures over the next few years brought them down to four members. They were relaunched as a septet in 2016, but the reshuffle did nothing to boost their popularity. The Brave Girls started out as a five-piece a decade ago, but fell largely on deaf ears. It seemed like no one wanted to see us on stage,” she said tearfully. “Reaction to our songs had always been cold. “At the start of the year, I thought it was time for us to end it,” lead singer Kim Min-young said.

The fan-led ascent is a reversal of the usual K-pop model, where bands are usually assembled, trained intensively and launched by record companies, whose marketing and promotion is crucial to their success. Less than a month later, the song reached number one in South Korea and topped the Billboard K-pop 100 in the US, four years after it was originally released - with their popularity reinforced by their story of struggle against the odds.

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