1VERSE · VOCALIST · LYRICIST
Kenny
Profile
| Stage name | Kenny |
|---|---|
| Born | December 9, 2002 |
| Roles | Vocalist and performer |
| Group | 1VERSE |
| Group debut | 2025 |
| Agency | See official profile |
Official socials
The multilingual former SM trainee helped write the debut, helped connect the lineup and understood early that a kitchen plus unsupervised idols is not a meal, it is infrastructure.
Back to the 1VERSE group profile
Career profile
| Birth name | Hao Ruiran (郝瑞然) · also known as Eric Hao |
|---|---|
| Stage name | Kenny |
| Born | December 9, 2002 |
| From | Los Angeles, California |
| Western zodiac | Sagittarius · curious, blunt and chronically willing to try one more route |
| Chinese zodiac | Water Horse · social, independent and difficult to keep inside one lane |
| Group | 1VERSE |
| Role | Vocalist · lyricist |
| Debut | July 18, 2025 with The 1st Verse |
| Agency | Singing Beetle |
| Status | Current member · 2025–present |
Before 1VERSE
Kenny grew up Chinese American in Los Angeles. He won the male division of the 2019 Water Cube Cup Los Angeles competition, trained at SM Entertainment and later competed on Asia Super Young, withdrawing for health reasons. That history gave him camera and trainee experience before Singing Beetle introduced a final group.
Music, performance and work
Kenny speaks Chinese, English, Korean and Spanish, plays guitar and contributed lyrics to “Shattered.” He also encouraged former SM trainee Aito to return to the idol path after Aito had begun teaching dance in Japan. Part of the 1VERSE lineup therefore exists because Kenny kept a connection alive. On camera, survival-show experience shows: he understands how a lens finds a person and how quickly it forgets one.
2026: WABIF and the SHATTERED tour
1VERSE returned on January 21, 2026 with “WABIF (Wide Awake Before I Fall),” a darker drill-influenced single that expanded the emotional vocabulary of the debut era. Kenny and Nathan co-wrote the song. That credit continues the pattern established on The 1st Verse: Kenny is not only delivering assigned lines, he is helping decide what the group says.
The song arrived alongside the group’s first major international touring chapter. The SHATTERED North American tour began in January 2026 and was followed by international dates and interviews that let the members explain their creative process in more detail. For Kenny, the tour also turned the abstract idea of a multinational group into practical work: interviews, fan communication and stages across several cultural contexts.
Kenny’s writing contribution on group records does not automatically make this a solo profile. He has not released a separate formal solo music catalog, so the canonical page remains on the member carousel only.
The panda side quest
Cooking Kenny is the obvious panda side quest. Food becomes an excuse for members to talk without a formal interview turning every answer into company brochure paste. His language skills also make him an unofficial translator of words and social cues when the group crosses markets.
Fandom notes and things the fact box misses
- Pre-debut competition: Water Cube Cup and Asia Super Young.
- Health boundary: leaving a competition is not a failure if the body says stop.
- Lineup connector: Kenny encouraged Aito to return.
- Cooking: a hobby, a series and an excellent excuse to expose group chemistry.
Los Angeles, China and the trainee route
Kenny Hao was born on December 9, 2002 and grew up in the Los Angeles area in a Chinese-American family. His path into Korean pop was international before the group concept existed. He trained in South Korea, including a period connected to SM Entertainment, and later appeared on the Chinese survival program Asia Super Young. He withdrew because of health concerns, which belongs in the history without being turned into either failure or mystery.
Joining Singing Beetle gave Kenny a different role from the usual foreign trainee brought into a nearly finished lineup. He became an early connector in the project that developed into 1VERSE. He encouraged Aito to return to training, helped bridge languages inside the team and brought existing performance experience into a company working with members whose preparation started from radically different places.
The group does not need those backgrounds flattened into a marketing slogan. Kenny is from the United States, has Chinese family and language connections, and works in South Korea. Those facts can coexist. The useful question is what he contributes: vocals, writing, communication and the ability to keep a multinational room from becoming five separate interviews.
1VERSE debut, writing and group identity
1VERSE debuted on July 18, 2025 with the single album The 1st Verse. Singing Beetle’s official profile lists Kenny as a vocalist. He also co-wrote the title track “Shattered,” giving him a documented creative role at debut rather than a vague future promise. The release framed damage and resilience through a group whose members did not arrive from one shared trainee pipeline.
In the Associated Press debut interview, Kenny described the group’s goal as being inclusive of each member’s history and current circumstances. That statement is important because 1VERSE received heavy attention for including North Korean defectors Hyuk and Seok. Kenny’s wording redirects the story toward all five members and toward a group identity that does not use two biographies as the entire product.
Later interviews and releases continued showing his participation in lyrics and group concepts. Kenny and Nathan contributed writing to “WABIF,” while member discussions around touring and new music placed the team beyond the novelty phase of its debut coverage. His cooking content also serves a real group function: low-stakes episodes expose timing, language habits and chemistry that a formal profile photograph cannot.
Music-video tracking note
Kenny does not currently have a verified individual solo music-video catalog. 1VERSE videos, including “Shattered,” “Multiverse” and later group releases, belong on the 1VERSE group profile. This page will add a personal tracker when he releases an official solo or separately credited individual video. Until then, copying the group total onto every member page would inflate the same release five times without adding useful metadata.
Official links and receipts
- Singing Beetle official 1VERSE profile
- 1VERSE YouTube · @1VERSE_official
- 1VERSE Instagram · @official1verse
- Associated Press debut interview
- “Shattered” RaeRae React
YouTube tracking history
Kenny does not currently have a separately verified official solo-video catalog. 1VERSE releases remain attached to the 1VERSE group profile so group totals are not duplicated as individual activity.
Official video tracker
This is the exact official 1VERSE video route connected to the profile. New uploads belong here by exact video ID; a replacement edit, performance film or lyric upload should never inherit this entry.
- “Shattered” official MV React — exact video
LE_lqvJ4qzoDaily+66Total views292.9K, released July 18, 2025.
Sources
Current status in 2026: WABIF, touring and the active formation
Kenny continued the authorship pattern from “Shattered” by co-writing WABIF with Nathan. The darker drill-influenced single fits his role as the group’s connective tissue: he can translate language, trainee expectations and emotional intent without making every line sound globally focus-tested.
During the Shattered tour and 2026 interviews, Kenny often became the person who could explain how five different histories entered one song. That work is not as flashy as a center shot, but small multinational groups live or die on it. His next artistic test is a release where the writing credit produces an unmistakably Kenny passage rather than only a well-integrated group voice.
Why Kenny is the connector
Kenny’s résumé—Los Angeles, Chinese American family, SM training, Water Cube Cup and Asia Super Young—can look like unrelated badges until the group context clicks. He understands formal trainee expectations, survival-show cameras and international communication. That lets him translate more than words. He can explain why a cue matters, when a member is missing a cultural reference and how to keep help from becoming condescension.
Encouraging Aito to return from dance teaching is the clearest proof. Kenny did not merely enter a finished lineup; he helped preserve one of its most important movement voices. His writing on “Shattered” and WABIF extends the same habit into music: connecting separate experiences until they sound like one group without forcing them into one biography.
Bottom line: the kitchen videos are charming, but the real infrastructure is a member who keeps people, languages and ideas in the same room. The next step is giving that connective work an unmistakable musical signature listeners can identify before reading the credits.
Translation is only the visible half of Kenny’s work
Kenny can bridge English, Mandarin and Korean contexts, but literal language transfer is the smallest version of that job. The harder work is translating expectation. A member new to Korean trainee culture may understand the sentence and still miss why a cue, hierarchy or rehearsal habit matters. Kenny’s longer industry exposure lets him explain the system without pretending the system is automatically correct.
That difference matters inside a multinational group. Translation can become control when the person with more fluency decides which emotion is acceptable or smooths every unusual answer into safe publicity. Kenny is most useful when the bridge remains two-way: helping members navigate the room while allowing their own phrasing, humor and disagreement to survive the crossing.
SM training is context, not a permanent quality stamp
Former big-company training attracts attention because fans treat the label as evidence that a performer passed an elite secret exam. Training can supply technique, discipline and familiarity with professional expectations. It does not guarantee debut, artistic identity or a good fit with every later project. Kenny’s route matters because he carried experience out of one system rather than remaining defined by the company that once evaluated him.
Inside 1VERSE, that experience can make rehearsal language less mysterious and cameras less intimidating. The risk is allowing polished habits to dominate a group whose members arrived through very different routes. The useful version of expertise creates access. It helps Seok, Hyuk, Nathan and Aito understand what a production needs without demanding that all five move, speak or imagine like graduates of the same academy.
Survival-show experience taught him what editing can do
Asia Super Young placed Kenny inside another system where performance, personality and ranking are compressed into episodes. That experience can sharpen camera response, but it also teaches a contestant how quickly an edit turns one moment into a permanent identity. The 1VERSE page should not repeat that mechanism by reducing him to the polished trainee, the translator or the cook.
Watch how he manages group content after living through competitive framing. He often helps another member finish a thought or supplies context without making the correction feel like a public failure. That social timing is not proof of perfection; it is evidence that he understands how vulnerable a person becomes when learning is happening in front of cameras and strangers are waiting to rank the result.
Bringing Aito back was a creative decision
Encouraging Aito to return from dance teaching was not only friendship or recruitment. It affected the group’s eventual performance architecture. Kenny recognized that Aito’s experience could solve a real need: five members with uneven training histories required somebody able to build choreography around difference instead of hiding it behind identical counts.
This is one reason Kenny’s connector role deserves more than a soft personality label. He identifies missing capacity and helps bring the right person into the room. The later choreography credit on “Shattered” makes the consequence visible. A member relationship became part of the group’s actual product, which is more substantial than saying they have good chemistry because they laugh in kitchen videos.
Writing “Shattered” without sanding away difference
Kenny’s co-writing credit on “Shattered” places him inside the debut thesis. Five origin stories meet through brokenness, rebuilding and the fear of fracture. The easy commercial version would flatten those histories into one universal inspirational slogan. The stronger choice lets the song remain collective while individual voices carry different kinds of weight.
His role should be described with precise verbs. He co-wrote; he did not single-handedly author every lyric, compose the track or own every member’s testimony. That boundary respects collaborators and protects the members whose lives inform the material. It also makes Kenny’s confirmed contribution more meaningful, because the page is not inflating credit simply to create a genius narrative around the multilingual member.
“WABIF” begins to reveal a musical fingerprint
Co-writing “WABIF” with Nathan extends Kenny’s authorship beyond the debut statement. The darker, drill-influenced mood asks for sharper rhythm and less ceremonial biography. That shift is healthy. If every 1VERSE song has to retell how the members reached the group, the catalog will become a press kit with drums.
The next listening task is identifying what persists across credits. Does Kenny favor direct phrasing, structural clarity, emotional contrast or a specific rhythmic pocket? Two songs are evidence of participation, not yet a complete signature. The profile can celebrate the pattern while leaving space for another release to confirm, complicate or overturn the first theory.
Cooking content shows power at a safer volume
The kitchen videos matter because food creates tasks that are ordinary enough to expose group habits. Who explains, who improvises, who waits for permission and who cleans a mistake without turning it into drama? Kenny’s communication skill becomes visible without the formal pressure of an interview about geopolitics, trauma or career ambition.
That does not make cooking a personality diagnosis. Edited content remains edited, and competence with one meal does not establish a permanent caretaker role. The useful evidence is interaction: he can guide without announcing himself as leader, translate without freezing the conversation and let another member’s confusion become funny without making the person the joke.
The connector still needs an individual edge
Infrastructure members risk being praised mainly for what they do for everybody else. Kenny deserves the question his own profile raises: what sounds unmistakably like him when the group no longer needs an explanation? Writing credits open that possibility, but the performance and catalog still need moments where his preference becomes audible before a reader checks the liner notes.
This does not require a solo debut. A verse, arrangement choice, recurring lyrical instinct or visual decision can establish individual authorship inside group work. The standard is recognition without isolation. Kenny should not have to leave the team to become specific, and the team should not treat his communication labor as a substitute for giving him musical character.
Touring makes the bridge physical
On tour, Kenny’s cross-cultural fluency moves from explanation into pacing. He can sense when an audience needs context, when translation is slowing momentum and when a member’s unfinished sentence deserves time instead of rescue. Those choices affect whether a small international show feels intimate or underprepared.
The danger is overreliance. A company cannot market a global group and then place every overseas communication task on one or two bilingual members. Accurate captions, venue information and official notices remain organizational responsibilities. Kenny can humanize access; he should not be required to manufacture the entire access system while also rehearsing and performing.
My Kenny replay map
Start with a complete Asia Super Young performance, then early SB BOYZ material where his trainee experience becomes group infrastructure. Continue through “MULTIVERSE,” both “Shattered” language versions, the “WABIF” visualizer and street performance. Add one cooking episode and one tour segment. Watch how he translates, redirects attention and contributes to the work without making every successful moment about being the person who already knew the rules.
Future updates should follow confirmed writing, performance development and any individually credited release without duplicating group totals. The page is waiting for a musical decision so Kenny-specific that listeners recognize it before the credits arrive. Until then, the connector role remains real work—and a starting point, not the ceiling.
