KPop Demon Hunters Talk 'Golden': Inside The Biggest Song Of The Year

Currently at its eighth week atop the Australian singles chart, and one of seven songs from the film KPop Demon Hunters in the ARIA Top 20, Golden will likely remain the biggest song, by any metric, of 2025. Maggie Kang, co-creator of the Netflix phenomenon was one of the first to hear a song that has by now pushed well past the boundaries of its animated source material.

The song’s co-writer, and voice of its animated lead singer Rumi, is Ejae. Already a veteran songwriter with K-Pop acts Red Velvet, Aespa and Twice, the 33-year-old Korean-American had written several of the songs that became part of the film’s soundtrack before she was attached to the film. Kang says it was the moment she heard Golden, that she knew the film would receive the backing of the studio, go into production and that the project’s success was, at least creatively, assured.

Songwriter Ejae likes to joke that Golden began at a dentist appointment. “I was on my way to get a gold filling,” she says. “Isn’t that insane? It was all meant to be.” Somewhere between the commute and the chair, the melody hit her. With a glint in her mouth, she rushed home, logged onto Zoom with her co-writer Mark Sonnenblick, and the pair began putting the song together.

“Obviously, there's fine-tuning,” says Ejae, “there was a lot of back and forth, but the main hook idea, we got really quickly. When we were done with that we were like, ‘Wait.’ Literally, Mark and I on Zoom and we're like, ‘Did we just write a hit?’ Like, it sounded so good.”  

Golden is unusual not just for its switch between English and Korean, or its three-octave vocal range that renders it almost impossible for a karaoke singer without operatic training to pull off, but the various roles it has to play.

Golden has to be an infectious, maximalist electropop song with huge appeal both in the world of the film, and in ours. It also has to function as a typical “I want” song from a musical – a song that outlines a character’s inner thoughts and their drive to achieve them like How Far I’ll Go from Moana or My Shot from Hamilton – and show that Rumi is battling to work out who she is and what it is that she wants in the first place.

Key to this was the demand from Kang and co-director Chris Appelhans, that the songs in their film require the singers push themselves to the very limit of her vocal range. This straining would give the sense that Rumi was struggling to fit the perfectionism required to be a part of the world’s biggest K-pop band, and to get the sense of commitment from the song’s writer and singer.

Within hours of Ejae’s dental appointment, the film’s music producer Ian Eisendrath had the demo in his inbox. His text back was blunt: This is massive, Ejae. This is a smash. He sent it immediately to Kang, who was in a car on the way to Vancouver airport.

“We were on a phone call, and he's like, ‘Maggie, I just need you to listen to this. Right now.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ So I took my AirPods out, and I'm listening to it, and I'm just like, I just heard the few notes of the beginning, and then I just had tears.”  

“Really?” asks Ejae, wide-eyed.  

“Yeah,” says Kang, turning to her. “I knew it was it. I was like, ‘This is it.’"  

“Yeah,” says Ejae. “I knew it too.”

With the film’s key creators on board, Golden had to be arranged to include the other members of the trio that would later be known as HUNTR/X – Audrey Nuna, the singing voice of Mira, and Rei Ami, the singing voice of Zoey. The song also had to function narratively as the band’s “best” single, which meant Kang stepped in to oversee its final transformation.

“When we were writing Golden, which was very hard to write, we wrote many, many different drafts that were very different from what we have now,” she says. “I was constantly asking Ejae, “Can you sing higher?" She's like, "Okay." And then I’d be like, "No, can we go higher?"  

“And I did it, y'all,” says Ejae. “It took lots of energy.”

Nuna agrees. “Yeah, at this point, we’d had like, three eight-hour rehearsals, six straight hours of vocals. It was like being on theatre camp. We were doing the song over and over again,” says Nuna, “and there was this moment,” she pauses.

“Audrey doesn't comment too much,” Kang interjects. “But when she comments, I mean, she freaking means it.”

“I had an emotional existential crisis,” says Nuna. “I'm emotionally constipated, so I process things very slowly, like probably four to six business weeks delayed. There was a moment I was breaking down in front of you guys,” she continues, turning to the others. “When we locked in, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what's going on? Is this real?’ That was the moment I really felt the three of us connected and we just felt like one unit. That was a really big breakthrough.”

That sense of strain and release carried into the composition itself. For a song that is so catchy, the structure of Golden is surprisingly complex.

It begins low in Ejae’s register, promising that it will build both melodically and dynamically. As Rumi, Ejae sings about living two lives and not being able to find her own place, a relatable statement for anyone, but especially for a character who (spoiler for KPop Demon Hunters) is part demon and part demon-hunter. This split is echoed musically as the verse moves with chords (A major and G major) that don’t match the scale of the vocal melody (C major). As the song builds it moves through two verses, two choruses and two pre-choruses that double as post-chorus breakdowns.

Unlike the ornamental production of much mid-2020s pop, Golden leans on dynamics and stamina. The verses are hushed and tentative, the pre-chorus lifts, and then the hook detonates with vocals pushed to what sounds like their upper limit. After the climax of the chorus, Ejae sings even higher, fulfilling then exceeding the promise of the song.

For all its polish now, the demo stage was fast and rough. “Verse, pre, to hook then post – all in one day,” Ejae says.

That sense of inevitability – the idea that this song was always waiting to happen – has carried into how it’s been received.

Plenty of fictional bands have put out real hits before, but Golden is different. It hasn’t just sold records or topped charts; it’s become background noise in everyday life. Kids sing it on playgrounds. DJs chop it into four-on-the-floor edits. Politicians quote it to connect with younger voters, for a song that was born out of mythmaking, its ambient presence makes sense. It’s also inspiring other art. Ejae admits to having watched some of the YouTube videos made in response to the song.

“I don’t watch all of them,” she says. “My dad and my mom and my fiance sent me a bunch of videos and it's interesting to watch. 'Cause they're like, "Oh, she's doing this technical skill, and she makes her voice up here," she raises her hand to represent falsetto. “I respect that, but I don't think I was doing that. I know what a mixed voice [a combination of chest voice and falsetto] sounds like and I was definitely not doing a mixed voice – there was a chest voice mixed into the mix. But it’s an interesting experience to watch other singers sing my song.”

Part of the reason for this cross-cultural connection is practical: Golden is easy to latch onto. The hook is simple enough to chant, the vocal peaks high enough to feel cathartic, but it’s also because the song’s origin – sudden inspiration, Zoom session, endless rehearsals – breaks down the distance between idea and artefact. Despite its sheen, Golden sounds unguarded. The effort to hit the high notes is part of the narrative, especially when underpinned by the unity of the group harmonies that follow and support. That’s a quality that Kang says was key to the film as a whole.

“What's so special about K-pop is the relationship between the idols and the fans,” she says. “To honour that, we folded that into the mythology of the film. That's the thing.  That connection is this magical force that fuels this whole movie and that protects the world, and that’s in Golden.”

“It’s such a hard song, but I can sing it with these girls by my side,” Ejae says, nodding to Ami and Nuna.

“I knew it was it,” says Kang. “It was just so magical, right from the beginning. I was like, ‘oh my gosh, we finally got it’.  And then I started crying. And then I cried more 'cause I was like, ‘It's getting better and better.’"  

“And then I hit the high notes,” says Ejae, scrunching up her face and singing: “Up up UP!”

KPop Demon Hunters is now streaming on Netflix.