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KPop Demon Hunters grew from a genre fan curiosity to a pop culture-conquering phenomenon so rapidly it can be easy to forget just how unlikely it was. An animated musical with no big-name voice actors, based around a genre with passionate but extremely protective fans, whose stars — even some of the very biggest ones — have found difficulty crossing over to the most mainstream American spaces? There were a million ways that could go wrong, and only one way that it really could go right: The songs were gonna have to be very, very, very good.
Luckily for KPop Demon Hunters, they had the right people on the case — from globe-spanning behind-the-scenes fixtures like Teddy Park and Mark Sonnenblick to help with the writing and production, to established (and Korean-rooted) singers EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI to provide the voices. And soon enough, they had the right songs: particularly “Golden,” which became the triumphant, chart-dominating signature anthem for the movie’s heroes HUNTR/X, both inside and outside of the film’s fictional universe.
The beauty of “Golden” was that, of course, it was the perfect HUNTR/X song. It’s aspirational, in the grand tradition of Disney “I Want” songs, but fittingly for a group of superheroes, it also feels inevitable — “We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment,” EJAE-as-Rumi declares on the chorus, leaving no room for doubt. (And with the high notes she hits at the chorus’ climax, anyone listening is sure to take her word for it.) Meanwhile, the song’s propulsive drums and glistening synths make the entire thing feel like an Olympic awards ceremony, with the trio singing and dancing at the gold-medal podium, as the Saja Boys no doubt sulk silently on either side of them.
But the real miracle of “Golden” is that you don’t need to already be a fan of KPop Demon Hunters — or really even of K-pop in general — to love it. It’s thrived in all the spaces (at the Grammys, on radio, even on certain dancefloors) where previous Disney and movie anthems failed, because they were too inextricably tied to their source soundtracks. Which isn’t to say that “Golden” won’t also be forever associated with KPDH, or that it would’ve been as big a hit without it. But the song is so glorious, and its ascent has taken it so high up, that it’s largely broken free of the movie’s orbit: Now it’s just the best, most exciting pop song of 2025, enjoying its moment all on its own. — A.U.
