KPop Demon Hunters Puts the Music First

Annual deliberations about which song dominates and typifies the sound and feel of summer were thrown a huge wrench this year with ex-influencer Alex Warren’s “Ordinary.” The chart topper for most of June, July, and August does not swelter; it’s a moody stomp-and-clap routine about locking in with your new wife. This is a shockingly churchy development. We favor a song of the summer that revels in a seasonally appropriate aversion to responsibilities. The post tends to go to a track much more conducive to or even expressly about following a steamy, unpredictable evening wherever it takes you, like Shaboozey’s jukebox staple “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” or the BTS sizzler “Butter.” So the question of if and when the summer of 2025 would course correct and coalesce around something fun simmered all season. Sabrina Carpenter’s gutting and vindictive “Manchild” briefly interrupted Warren’s “Hot 100” stranglehold in June only to be overtaken in a week. More symbolic than that “fuck my life” jam cutting in for a dance is the ascension of Huntr/x’s “Golden,” from Netflix’s megahit animated film KPop Demon Hunters, to the apex of the chart this week. History was made, and lengthy droughts have concluded. Huntr/x is a fictional K-pop girl group, and their rousing hit is the first American No. 1 for Korean female pop vocalists.

The last girl group to top the “Hot 100” was Destiny’s Child with 2001’s “Bootylicious,” and a cartoon band hasn’t seen this kind of Stateside traction since the mid-20th-century era of the Archies, Chipmunks, and Pussycats. Huntr/x isn’t quite like any of these cases. It’s also not like Gorillaz ruling the U.K. singles chart with 2005’s “Dare,” or like the two Disney recordings that became sweeping monocultural moments more recently: Encanto’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” and Frozen’s “Let It Go.” Huntr/x songs live in Demon Hunters’s universe as diegetic pop music and not just coincidentally very melodically buoyant exclamations of a character’s feelings and goals. A listener needs not only to grasp what motivates the trio of Rumi, Mira, and Zoey — their songs are secretly tasked with restoring the barrier between human and demon realms — but also to feel like their music could, as suggested at one point, outpace veteran South Korean group Twice in streams.

Writer-director duo Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans tapped Blackpink producer and scene elder Teddy Park to root this visual, narrative, and auditory ode to the culture and spirit of South Korea in convincing K-pop aesthetics. The result is a batch of tunes capable of escaping the unique contexts of the film. All the while, Demon Hunters lovingly works the joke that the K-pop music video is an art form mustering enough metaphysical wanderlust and carefully cultivated absurdism — check Twice turning into aliens in the “Signal” video or TRCNG’s lycanthropic “Wolf Baby” — that artists could feasibly be waging spiritual warfare live in concert. Story beats, like a consequential chart showdown or a laughably short group hiatus, approach the classic coming-of-age yarn via tentpole rituals of fandom. But Huntr/x’s music is literally capable of saving lives. “Golden” poses a simple question: What would a song that could demonstrably heal the world sound like?

The answer is “like a Katy Perry or Ariana Grande banger.” “Golden” is brimming with a turn-of-the-2010s stadium-pop swagger, repurposing the 12/8 strut of Britney Spears’s “Womanizer” or Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me” to sing not about sex, which the chugging time signature is often used to conjure, but burrowing deep to mine untapped potential. The song tracks Huntr/x lead vocalist Rumi’s journey to self-love, her escape from literal shackles of fear, but blunts the specificity of the group’s supernatural quandaries in language applicable to anyone’s life: “Given the throne, I didn’t know how to believe / I was the queen that I’m meant to be.” The vocal gymnastics call back to the likes of Grande’s “Break Free” and Perry’s “Roar.” Huntr/x is a product of an international exchange of sounds between American and South Korean pop markets. Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami, the real singers behind the group, share ties to both countries; Kang said actor Ahn Hyo-seop’s K-drama experience and a command of the English language helped get him cast as Jinu, the leader of the rival demon boy band Saja Boys. A dollop of sorely missed American dance-pop aesthetics is a gust of wind in the sales of “Golden,” but the Demon Hunters music grows more intriguing the less it sells universal, inspirational fare.

The Saja Boys score the most intriguing slap: “Your Idol” is a sinister meta-textual yarn where the K-pop idol’s offer to be a vessel to the adulation and romantic interest of an audience takes the tone of a deal with the devil. Saja’s narrative convention — what if those perfect pop bachelors were secretly dicks and the artist upstaging your fave has, in fact, been sent from hell to dine on your eternal soul? — toys alluringly with the premise that K-pop is a manifestation of an age-old spiritual force powerful enough to destroy or rejuvenate lives. Their challenge to Huntr/x’s ancestral feel-good initiative lets the soundtrack push the girls to the brink, untangling knots of interpersonal strife and shame on the way to the epiphany of the hit single.

From the brash, trappy Huntr/x fight anthem “Takedown” to the tender, unlikely Rumi-and-Jinu duet “Free” to the baile funk and EDM banger “How It’s Done,” Demon Hunters ties an airtight collection of serviceable songs to a gorgeous and affecting visual display. In the girls’ quest to modernize traditions, everything from their use of real ceremonial weapons to all the backup Boys (Baby, Abby, Mystery, Romance) being named after the group tropes they’re based on is steeped in both ancient and recent history. This conflict between old and new ripples throughout all of the musical’s tendrils. How true one ought to be to the past is a debate “Golden” is staging in its lyrics and production. Demon Hunters thrives on dualities. The music is breezy but considered, sharing a wink with the K-pop superfans who claim their real-life idol clearly inspired a character while also acting as an introductory course for the casual fan who only knows anything pertaining to BTS does numbers — people who don’t think about OGs Seo Taiji and Boys when they hear “Saja Boys.”

Timing is favorable. Blackpink now has members popping up in PlayStation ads, HBO shows, and even Warren’s album. Demon Hunters builds on the momentum of Blackpink and Twice getting to headline Coachella and Lollapalooza, respectively. The American charts are increasingly coming to grips with the fact that there are mainstream musical dynamos all over the planet — in Seoul, in Lagos, in San Juan — and this current K-pop push gets that English-language lyrics grease the wheels for such a crossover. All the while, Warren and ex-Mormon pop gymnast Benson Boone’s homespun sorta-Christian sentimentality isn’t half as capable of setting anyone’s dance floor ablaze. (Grocery stores, however …) For their efforts, life has imitated art, as Huntr/x has now stolen the show from not one but two cloyingly chipper bro brigades.

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