Kim Minju's 'Still Shining' Just Got Its Most Emotional Song Yet

Kim Pureum (김푸름) has quietly been building one of the most distinctive profiles of any young Korean singer-songwriter to emerge from an audition program in recent years. On March 27, 2026, she added a significant new entry to that profile: the seventh OST for JTBC's Friday drama series Still Shining (샤이닝), a youth romance starring former IZ*ONE member Kim Minju in her first leading role, and actor Park Jin-young as her counterpart. The song, also titled "Shining" (샤이닝), dropped at 6PM KST across major Korean streaming platforms.

It is the kind of assignment that emerging singer-songwriters in Korea navigate carefully. A drama OST is not simply a background piece — it is, in many cases, the sonic signature of an entire emotional arc, the track that plays when two characters finally say what they've been holding back, or when a scene demands something that the dialogue alone cannot carry. For Kim Pureum, who has long been celebrated for the emotional precision of her writing and performance, the brief was well-matched to her strengths.

The Drama Behind the Song: Kim Minju's Breakthrough in 'Still Shining'

JTBC's Still Shining premiered on March 6, 2026, as part of the network's Friday time slot — a block with a consistent track record for youth-oriented romantic dramas that find dedicated followings among younger Korean viewers. The series follows an original script with no source material, setting up a story in which the chemistry between the two leads is complicated, cold, and complicated again before it resolves into something warmer.

Kim Minju — who rose to prominence as a member of the project group IZ*ONE before transitioning to acting — takes the lead role of Mo Eun-ah (모은아), a character whose emotional journey has been at the center of the drama's critical reception. By the time the show's tenth week of broadcast rolled around, Kim Minju had cracked the top five of Korea's drama actor buzz chart with a 3.90 percent audience share, a number that underscores both the show's momentum and the effectiveness of her performance in a role that demands considerable emotional range.

For a K-pop act making a full-scale pivot to drama acting — a transition that some artists navigate effortlessly and others find disorienting — Kim Minju has approached Still Shining with a careful seriousness. Observers have noted that the drama offers her a kind of exposure that music promotion rarely does: extended scenes, sustained emotional arcs, and the chance to demonstrate range across episodes rather than in three-minute promotional cycles.

Kim Pureum and the Art of the Drama OST

The seventh OST slot in a drama's run is not the most prominent position — that honor typically goes to the first or second release, which arrives when an audience is still forming its attachment to the story — but it is often among the most emotionally resonant. By the seventh track, the drama's mood and palette are established, and the composer and producer can calibrate the music to something the audience already feels, rather than predicting what they will feel.

Kim Pureum's "Shining" approaches that task through restraint. The song's arrangement, as described by the production team, centers on minimal textures: pad sounds, drum beats, and keyboard tones that create space rather than filling it. The effect is a vocal-forward track in which Kim Pureum's voice carries the weight that the instrumentation deliberately refuses to. The lyrical conceit — that the characters' pasts, memories, and interior lives contain moments as bright as light — mirrors the drama's central metaphor without announcing itself too loudly.

Kim Pureum came to national attention in 2022 through Channel A's audition program Youth Star (청춘스타), where she competed in the singer-songwriter category at just 17 years old and generated significant audience response with original material. In the four years since, she has continued to develop her own musical identity, occupying a space in Korean music that bridges indie sensibility with commercial production without sacrificing either. Her involvement in a major JTBC production represents an important step in that trajectory: it places her voice in front of the millions of viewers who engage with Friday drama OSTs as part of their regular viewing habits.

Why K-Drama OSTs Keep Launching Careers

The K-drama OST pipeline has a long history of functioning as a career accelerant for artists who might otherwise take years to reach mainstream audiences. When a song connects with a drama's emotional peak — the confession scene, the goodbye, the reunion — it can accumulate streams and awareness far beyond what a standalone single release would typically generate. Listeners who have no prior relationship with an artist can become devoted fans through a three-minute piece of music that arrives at exactly the right emotional moment in a story they are already invested in.

For Kim Pureum, "Shining" arrives at a point when Still Shining has already established its audience and built the emotional context that the song is designed to inhabit. The music supervisor, Nam Hye-seung (남혜승), has reportedly shaped the drama's overall sonic landscape with a consistent vision, and the selection of Kim Pureum for the seventh installment reflects both a trust in her ability to deliver the emotional register the scene demands and an awareness of the kind of artist she is becoming.

"The song musically interprets the time, memories, and shining moments that remain in the characters' hearts," the production team described ahead of the release, "deepening the emotional tone of the drama." It is the kind of description that sounds familiar in K-drama OST marketing, but in Kim Pureum's hands, the execution behind it deserves attention in its own right.

JTBC's Still Shining continues its Friday broadcast run, with its cast and soundtrack generating consistent conversation among viewers who have made it one of the network's more closely followed current productions. Kim Pureum's "Shining" is available now on major streaming platforms, and for listeners discovering her work for the first time through this soundtrack, it offers a useful introduction to a voice that has been steadily developing toward exactly this kind of moment.