IU, DAY6 and Squid Game All Brought Him Back. Who Was Shin Hae-chul?

Part 1 of 11 in Shin Hae-chul: The Demon King K-pop Keeps Bringing Back

The cheering song in the three-legged race of Netflix’s Squid Game Season 2 was written in 1988 by a 20-year-old college student named Shin Hae-chul. Korea called him the “Demon King.” He died at 46 after a botched surgery in 2014, and today DAY6 and IU are singing his song again.

Shin Hae-chul – “To You” (Lyrics Video, DanalEntertainment) — 1.86 million views

The cheering song Squid Game picked

Squid Game Season 2 came out on Dec. 26, 2024. “To You” (Geudaeege) plays while five players, legs tied together, run as one, and the show’s music director said the song had been written into the script from the start (Nocut News, Feb. 9, 2025). In March 2025 a “Squid Game Season 2 version” was released as its own single (Melon). The distributor’s English lyric video simply calls it “The cheering song in Squid Game 2.”

To Koreans the choice was no surprise. The song has been the anthem of Korean college festivals for 38 years (Hankyoreh, Oct. 24, 2024). In June 2024, MBC’s Hangout with Yoo? called it “the flower of festival music” and handed it to DAY6.

DAY6 – “To You” (Hangout with Yoo?, MBC, 2024) — 700,000 views

Also read: A Med Student Wrote It the Night Before an Exam. Kim Kwang-seok Made It Last.

Why idols keep singing him

IU sang “To You” on the stage of the MBC College Song Festival, and JYP’s band Xdinary Heroes played it on KBS radio in January 2024. Highlight’s Yang Yo-seob, GFRIEND’s Yuju, BTOB’s Seo Eun-kwang and Super Junior’s Kyuhyun have each picked his songs on TV (Parts 5, 8, 9 and 10).

IU – “To You” (MBC College Song Festival) — 160,000 views

Xdinary Heroes – “To You” (DAY6’s Kiss the Radio, KBS CoolFM, 2024) — 40,000 views

His ties to idols run deeper than covers. Moon Hee-joon of H.O.T., the first-generation boy band, recalled that when he was drowning in hate comments for daring to play rock as an idol, Shin, whom he had never met, called him, bought him dinner and told him to keep making music. Moon said Shin was “like a father.” PSY learned sound in Shin’s studio as a rookie, getting scolded along the way, and said that is what fed “Gangnam Style” (Newsis, Oct. 4, 2024). In the summer of 2024, Shin appeared on the screens of PSY’s Summer Swag concerts.

From ballad idol to rock’s Demon King

Shin was born in 1968. In 1988, while studying philosophy at Sogang University, he won the grand prize at the MBC College Song Festival with his band Infinite Track (Muhan Gwedo). The head judge, Korean pop legend Cho Yong-pil, is said to have known it was a winner from the intro alone (Part 11; Hankyoreh, Oct. 24, 2024). In 1990 his first solo album, led by “Don’t Look So Sad,” made him a teen star who shot sneaker ads. In 1992 he walked away from that and formed the rock band N.EX.T, short for New EXperiment Team (Busan Ilbo, Oct. 21, 2015). N.EX.T piled orchestras on top of heavy metal and progressive rock, and in 1997 released Lazenca, a rock opera with strings recorded in London (JoongAng Ilbo, Oct. 20, 2024).

The “Demon King” nickname stuck in the 2000s through Ghost Station, his late-night radio show. He was a regular panelist on MBC’s debate show 100 Minutes Debate and one of the few Korean celebrities who argued in public for abolishing the adultery law and banning corporal punishment in schools (Busan Ilbo, Aug. 4, 2016). Clips of those arguments still travel through short videos to people born after he died (Hankyoreh, Oct. 24, 2024).

He wrote every song himself

This blog’s Kim Kwang-seok series was about a singer who turned other people’s songs into his own. Shin is the opposite. Of the 10 songs below, he wrote both words and music for all but one, and even that one, “Don’t Look So Sad,” has his lyrics (Melon). The writer can’t walk on stage and tell the story behind them anymore, so every time a younger singer takes one on, his absence gets sung along with it.

The surgery, as the courts found it

On Oct. 17, 2014, he had surgery for an intestinal blockage at a hospital in Seoul’s Songpa district. The surgeon performed a laparoscopic adhesion removal and also reduced the size of his stomach. Afterward Shin complained of high fever and severe pain. On Oct. 22 he lost consciousness and was taken to Asan Medical Center, and he died around 8 p.m. on Oct. 27 (Hankyoreh, May 11, 2018).

The courts settled what happened. In May 2018, Korea’s Supreme Court upheld a one-year prison sentence for the surgeon, Kang Se-hoon, for professional negligence resulting in death and for violating the Medical Service Act. The court found he “could have foreseen that the victim had developed peritonitis, yet failed to provide proper treatment or transfer him,” and also convicted him of posting the dead patient’s medical information online (Hankyoreh, May 11, 2018). In May 2019 a ruling ordering him to pay Shin’s family about $1.02 million in damages became final (Newsis, May 30, 2019). The same surgeon was later convicted twice more over other patients (Seoul Economic Daily, Jan. 31, 2026). In November 2016 a law took effect that lets mediation over fatal or seriously disabling medical accidents start on the patient’s side alone, and Korea calls it the “Shin Hae-chul Law” (KBS, Nov. 29, 2016).

The 10 songs YouTube chose

The countdown runs from No. 10 to No. 1, one song per part. I ranked them on Oct. 25, 2026, by adding up YouTube views for each song: Shin’s and N.EX.T’s own videos plus remakes, covers and TV performances by other singers (30 to 70 videos per song).

Rank	Song	Released	Total views	Part
10	Fly, Chick	N.EX.T, 1994	about 5.8 million	2
9	A Letter to Myself	solo, 1991	about 6.3 million	3
8	From the Sun to the Boy	N.EX.T, 1997	about 6.7 million	4
7	When Our Lives Are Coming to an End	Infinite Track, 1989	about 7.9 million	5
6	Dream of a Freshwater Eel	solo, 1999	about 8.5 million	6
5	Don’t Look So Sad	solo, 1990	about 8.6 million	7
4	You, Deep Inside My Heart	solo, 1991	about 10.4 million	8
3	Invitation to Everyday Life	solo, 1998	about 11.6 million	9
2	Lazenca, Save Us	N.EX.T, 1997	about 42.4 million	10
1	To You	Infinite Track, 1988	about 77.1 million	11

The top two are bigger than the other eight combined. One became a cheering song. The other started as a cartoon theme and became the high-note test of Korean singing contests.

Next, No. 10: “Fly, Chick.” The first death Shin ever saw, at five, was a yellow chick.

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Sources: Nocut News (Feb. 9, 2025); Melon (song credits; “To You (Squid Game Season 2 version),” March 14, 2025); Newsis (Oct. 4, 2024, on MBC documentary “Our Brother, Shin Hae-chul”); Hankyoreh (Oct. 24, 2024; May 11, 2018); Korea Economic Daily (Oct. 11, 2026); Busan Ilbo (Oct. 21, 2015; Aug. 4, 2016); JoongAng Ilbo (Oct. 20, 2024); Donghaeng Media (Oct. 27, 2025); Newsis (May 30, 2019); Seoul Economic Daily (Jan. 31, 2026); KBS (Nov. 29, 2016). View counts as shown on YouTube, Oct. 25, 2026. Exchange rate: 2019, $1 ≈ 1,165 won.