The clock is in the post. Korean labels almost never write a release date in a sentence — they write it as a line, and that line carries the hour. ONEWE's channel put the whole rollout in one description: 2026.05.28 RELEASED, then 2026.07.27 6PM (KST), then 2026.08.19 6PM (KST). Read the line and you have the moment.
6PM (KST) is the default. It is the slot most Korean releases are announced for, and once you know it, most announcements stop needing decoding. When a post says 6PM (KST), a fan in Seoul gets the song at six in the evening; everyone else counts from there.
0AM is the one that trips people. i-dle's channel announced a MIYEON single as 2026.08.10 0AM (JST/KST) — that is the midnight which begins August 10, not the one that ends it. If you are outside Korea and Japan, the song is landing on what still feels like the ninth to you. Two labels sit on that one line because Japan and Korea keep the same clock, so it is a single moment, not two.
Then there is the line with no hour at all. A 1theK teaser gave its release card as 'Artist : Splayit', 'Title : Last bus(막차)', Release : 2026.08.13 — a date, full stop. That is not a midnight release. It means the hour has not been announced, and any site printing 00:00 for it is showing you a time nobody stated. Announcements also sometimes carry the date as a tag instead: ONEWE's teaser closed with #Release #20260819.