After School (Hangui: 애프터스쿨), is a South Korean girl group with an admissions and graduation concept formed by Pledis Entertainment. In the beginning of 2009, a few days before After School’s debut, Pledis Entertainment announced that the group’s music concept was heavily influenced by the Pussycat Dolls. In January, the group released their debut single album New Schoolgirl. The album had three songs: the lead single “Ah!”, “Play Girlz” and “Bad Guy”. A teaser for their debut music video was released on the same day and gained over 100,000 views before its release the next day. Two days later, After School made their debut stage on television music program Music Core. Following promotional activities for “AH!”
In April 2009, a new member Uee joined the group. The group then released their second single, “Diva” in April 2009. They first performed the song on M! Countdown. After School went on to win the “Rookie of the Month” award for the month of April 2009 at the Cyworld Digital Music Awards with this single.
In October, Soyoung officially graduated from the group to pursue an acting career. Two new members were then added to the group, Raina and Nana. In November, After School released their new single “Because of You” which had exceeded over 30,000 pre-orders. The song marked a change for the group to a more mature and sophisticated concept and became extremely popular, winning three Mutizen awards for the group on SBS’ Inkigayo.
At the start of 2010, the group won the Best Rookie Award at both the Billboard Japan Music Awards and Seoul Music Awards. After School performing “Bang!” in 2010. In March, After School released their third single album Bang with new member Lizzy where the group took on a marching band concept. Kahi revealed that she was inspired after watching the American film Drumline, and had always wanted to do a marching band concept ever since she took to the stage as an After School member. The group practiced playing the drums for five months with a trainer for the single. The title track entered the Gaon Weekly Chart at number 2 and reached number 29 on the 2010 Gaon year-end digital chart with 2,374,731 digital downloads sold.
After this the group went on to find success in Japan and began to devolve into subsets, the first being Orange Caramel (Raina, Nana, and Lizzy) who had hits in thier own right. After School’s first studio album, Virgin, was released in April 2011 with new member E-Young. The title track, “Shampoo”, was composed by Japanese producer Daishi Dance] and the music video was released later that day. The music video for “Let’s Step Up”, the intro track on the album, featured After School performing a tap-dance routine, which was praised internationally by tap dancers.
