A Song That Wasn't Even a Title Track Reached No. 1 for the First Half — HANRORO's 'Landing in Love'

In three lines

• HANRORO's 'Landing in Love (사랑하게 될 거야)' finished No. 1 in both the digital and streaming categories of Circle Chart's 2026 first-half tally.
• It is an album track from HANRORO's first EP, released in August 2023 — and it was not even a title track.
• It stayed inside the weekly digital top 10 from week 48 of 2025 through the first half of 2026.

The numbers first

In Circle Chart's 2026 first-half tally, HANRORO's 'Landing in Love' finished No. 1 on the digital chart with a Circle Index of 315,527,555. It was also No. 1 on the streaming chart in the same tally — two categories. (Newsis, Kyunghyang Shinmun)

Let me be precise about which categories. This is the digital and streaming categories of Circle Chart's 2026 first-half tally. Within that same tally, the No. 1 differs from category to category.

Category	No. 1	Figure
Digital	HANRORO 'Landing in Love'	Circle Index 315,527,555
Streaming	HANRORO 'Landing in Love'	No. 1 for the half
Album	BTS 'ARIRANG'	4,224,016 copies
Global K-pop	'Golden'	38 weeks running

(Source: Newsis, Kyunghyang Shinmun)

Different charts count different things, so nobody pushed anybody aside — these are No. 1s on separate axes. An album chart counts how many physical copies were sold; digital and streaming charts count how long people kept listening. The side this song won on is the side that counts how long.

It was not a title track

'Landing in Love' is a track on '이상비행 (Isangbihaeng)', HANRORO's first EP, released on 29 August 2023. That album's two designated title tracks were '이상비행' and '금붕어'. (Newspim, Star News) So this was not the song pushed out front.

Three years after release, an album track that was never the lead has arrived at the top of a half-year tally.

It did not spike. It stayed.

Here is the span that is confirmed: from week 48 of 2025 through the first half of 2026, the song did not fall out of the weekly digital top 10. (Newsis, Seoul Economic Daily)

That is not the graph of a song that shoots up for a week and disappears. It is the graph of a song that stays. A half-year tally adds up the index accumulated across the period, so the structure favours a song that lingers over one that spikes.

Short-form clips of live performances and word of mouth are cited as the background. (Kyunghyang Shinmun, Seoul Economic Daily) The music video passed 10 million YouTube views as of midnight on 3 July 2026. (Star News, Newspim)

That's the last of the numbers. Now, the music.

An ordinary day in an unfamiliar city

'Landing in Love' was written and composed by HANRORO, a singer-songwriter signed to Authentic; the arrangement is by Isae. The music video was shot in Hong Kong, built around the idea of small everyday moments while travelling. Nothing dramatic happens — a day in an unfamiliar city simply goes by.

What this song has been doing for three years was probably much the same. Sitting quietly on someone's commute, on someone's night walk, until that accumulated time surfaced at the top of a tally. The ranking is a result attached afterwards; what the song was doing had been going on long before.