NU'EST
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
40 free NU'EST trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
NU'EST had one of the strangest careers in K-pop. The five-piece arrived in 2012 with a debut that drew real attention, spent years struggling to follow it, and came close to breaking up. Then a gamble on a television talent contest in 2017 sent their old records racing back up the charts, and the group finished its ten-year run as an award winner. This quiz follows that whole arc: who the members are and where they come from, the early singles and the albums that came later, the unit that kept the name alive while one member was away, and the acting, musical-theatre and solo work around the music. The opening questions suit anyone who knows a song or two, and the later ones are for fans who followed every era. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a miss still tells you something new about the group.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A Seoul court revealed in 2020 that producers had cut NU'EST's Baekho from the winning lineup of which show?
Produce 101
Produce 101 Season 2 should have put Baekho in its final eleven, and the appeal court named him among twelve trainees unfairly eliminated by rigged votes.
Q 02What does the W stand for in NU'EST W, the four-member unit that promoted during 2017 and 2018?
Wait
Wait was the promise in the name: four members would hold on until Minhyun came back from a year and a half with another group.
Q 03Which NU'EST debut single about school bullying passed 100 million YouTube views seven years after release?
Face
Face crossed the mark in April 2019, on the eve of the group's first album as five in three years.
Q 04NU'EST's Minhyun spent a year and a half in which project group after finishing ninth on a 2017 survival show?
Wanna One
Wanna One took the show's top eleven, and Minhyun did not rejoin his old bandmates until the end of January 2019.
Q 05Labelmate Uee named NU'EST's Baekho after the hero of which Japanese sports manga, citing a resemblance?
Slam Dunk
Slam Dunk's hero Hanamichi Sakuragi is known as Kang Baek-ho in the Korean edition, a name that also fits the singer's real surname, Kang.
Q 06Which Los Angeles-born singer stayed behind when his four NU'EST bandmates entered a TV survival show in 2017?
Aron
Aron was the oldest of the five and had earlier turned down a place at New York University, where he planned to study journalism, in order to sing.
Q 07NU'EST fans share which name, spelled out by the first letters of the opening four tracks on the EP Q Is?
Love
Love is spelled by Lost & Found, Overcome, VVith and Emotion, and the closing track One Kis2 swaps a letter for a 2 to form a heart.
Q 08Which agency launched NU'EST in 2012 as its first boy band, three years before debuting Seventeen?
Pledis Entertainment
Pledis Entertainment was founded in 2007 by Han Sung-soo and kept all five members for exactly ten years, until their contracts ran out in March 2022.
Q 09NU'EST's EPs Q Is, Canvas and Happily Ever After tell a three-part story of knights searching for whom?
A queen
A queen is the figure the knights seek, and the Korean title of the trilogy's opening single translates as The Queen's Knight.
Q 10Why did Baekho sit out NU'EST's 2015 anniversary single I'm Bad, appearing only on its B-side?
Vocal cord surgery
Vocal cord surgery for nodules kept him off the lead track, after doctors told him to rest his voice completely.
Q 11NU'EST's main vocalist Baekho drew on the seas around which island, his birthplace, for his solo debut single?
Jeju
Jeju is where he was born, in Aewol, and he has said he never meant to go into music until a talent scout found him.
Q 12NU'EST's Minhyun and Ren, both born in the second half of 1995, share which southern port city as a birthplace?
Busan
Busan produced both singers, and Minhyun was scouted at fifteen and trained for almost two years before the group's debut.
Q 13NU'EST-M, a 2013 spin-off that added a sixth member named Jason, was built to target which country's market?
China
China was the goal: the unit was a collaboration with Yuehua Entertainment, which supplied its trainee Jason, and it re-recorded two earlier singles.
Q 21NU'EST is short for a four-word phrase that begins New Establish Style and ends with which word?
Tempo
Tempo completes the name, a phrase the group also turned into a stage number on their 2015 tour of Japan.
Q 22Which compilation album did NU'EST release as a farewell, exactly ten years after their debut?
Needle & Bubble
Needle & Bubble paired remastered favourites with the lead single Again, and the members broke the news of the split in handwritten letters to fans.
Q 23NU'EST's Minhyun made his musical-theatre debut in 2019 as Count Axel von Fersen in which show?
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette later called on a second member of the group: Baekho took the same role in the show's tenth-anniversary production in 2024.
Q 14NU'EST W recorded the song And I for the soundtrack of which 2018 period drama starring Lee Byung-hun?
Mr. Sunshine
Mr. Sunshine gave the unit a chart-topper: the track reached number one on the Mnet, Naver Music and Soribada charts.
Q 15Which company became the largest shareholder of NU'EST's agency, also home to Seventeen, in May 2020?
Big Hit Entertainment
Big Hit Entertainment, renamed Hybe the following year, let the agency keep running as its own label within a growing multi-label group.
Q 16Before their 2012 debut, NU'EST performed at a year-end TV festival billed as the 'Boys' of which girl group?
After School
After School shared an agency with the five trainees, who had already danced behind the group's Blue unit in the Wonder Boy video.
Q 17NU'EST's Minhyun played the mage Seo Yul in which tvN fantasy drama written by the Hong sisters?
Alchemy of Souls
Alchemy of Souls ran for 30 episodes across 2022 and early 2023, with Minhyun starring beside Lee Jae-wook and Jung So-min.
Q 18Which 2019 NU'EST EP produced the group's first single to win on all five major music shows?
The Table
The Table swapped the group's darker concepts for a bright one, with each song framed as a romance story friends might share over dinner.
Q 19Which 2013 NU'EST single surged back up the charts in 2017 and returned to music shows four years after its release?
Hello
Hello placed 11th on Inkigayo that summer, promoted by the four members who had stayed together as a unit.
Q 20On which weekly music show did NU'EST make their 2012 debut stage and NU'EST W earn a first-ever win in 2017?
M Countdown
M Countdown handed over the trophy on 19 October 2017, more than five years after the debut stage, for the single Where You At.
Q 24NU'EST's Ren followed his stage debut in Everybody's Talking About Jamie with the title role in which rock musical?
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Hedwig and the Angry Inch cast him in 2021 as its genderqueer singer, a year after he first stepped on stage as the schoolboy Jamie.
Q 25Before NU'EST debuted, JR appeared in the Bangkok City video and Minhyun in Shanghai Romance, both by which girl group?
Orange Caramel
Orange Caramel were labelmates of the trainees, and JR was also featured on Uee's solo song Sok Sok Sok before the debut.
Q 26Which nickname did NU'EST earn in South Korea after their old records surged back up the charts in 2017?
Reversal Icons
Reversal Icons marked a turnaround so sharp that a group once close to splitting won at its first year-end awards ceremony later that year.
Q 27NU'EST staged their first solo showcase in North America in May 2015 in which Texas city?
Dallas
Dallas got the show through MyMusicTaste, a fan-driven concert platform, and general admission tickets were later made free.
Q 28Which 2019 single, NU'EST's first as five in three years, drew 10 million YouTube views within a week?
Bet Bet
Bet Bet closed the group's knight trilogy and climbed to number two on Billboard Korea's K-pop 100.
Q 29Which lead single from NU'EST's 2021 album Romanticize won trophies on four different weekly music shows?
Inside Out
Inside Out fronted the group's second full-length Korean album, which gave each of the five members a solo song of his own.
Q 30Which 2014 release, led by the single Good Bye Bye, was NU'EST's first full-length Korean album?
Re:Birth
Re:Birth peaked at number five on the Gaon album chart and also gathered the group's four earlier title tracks near the end of its running order.