In 2003, at 11 years old, Kim Eun-jae signed with the Korean agency SM Entertainment as a trainee, hoping to rise through the necessary steps to become a K-pop idol. She worked for the company for over a decade: practicing before school or into the night, doing vocal and dance training, taking language and acting classes. She watched her peers get called up for groups like SHINee and f(x), but her own debut never came. When Kim, now known professionally as Ejae, was finally dropped by the agency in 2015, the explanation she got was simple: This was a business. As she recently told the Philippine media network ABS-CBN, "SM has a very specific vision and sonic sound and I just didn't really fit that."
Ejae's story could easily have ended there. "I had deep emotional wounds related to idols and K-pop," she admitted in the same interview. "I resented the industry a lot." But after graduating from the Clive Davis Institute at NYU Tisch, she found her way to a behind-the-scenes role. It was an SM songwriting camp that first brought her back to the industry, and she continued to work in its periphery, scoring writing credits for the groups Red Velvet, Twice and aespa, and working in animation, where she met the film and TV composer Daniel Rojas. Rojas was the first musician recruited to work on the Netflix animated musical KPop Demon Hunters, and he quickly recommended Ejae to co-creator Maggie Kang.
After hearing her initial demos, the directors decided to hire the former would-be idol — not merely as a songwriter, but as the singing voice for the film's lead character, the purple-haired pop star Rumi. Ejae is one of the co-writers and producers behind "Golden," the standout hit that dominated the Billboard Hot 100 in 2025 and is now nominated for the Grammy for song of the year. In the most roundabout way possible, an agency castoff had become the soul and voice of K-pop's greatest cultural phenomenon yet.
KPop Demon Hunters is one of several properties born of the modern K-pop industry to be nominated by the Recording Academy this year. Blackpink member Rosé's Bruno Mars collab "APT." is nominated for song and record of the year; both "Golden" and "APT." are competing in the best pop duo / group performance category; and the multi-ethnic sextet Katseye is up for best new artist. These are not the first nods for K-pop at the ceremony — BTS has flirted with best pop duo / group performance since 2021 — but collectively, they represent a Western embrace of the form that feels unprecedented. (Rosé, for starters, is the first lead K-pop artist to be nominated in any of the "big four" award categories.) And in so doing, these developments point to a bigger question, one embodied by Ejae's anti-idol career trajectory: When we talk about a "K-pop song" now, what exactly do we mean?
The dimensions of that "K" have long been a topic of inquiry: whether K-pop refers to a genre in its own right, the agency system that develops the artists, or merely a national designation. For most of the music's history, the consensus was simple: K-pop songs were just pop songs sung primarily in Korean, and that was the only distinction necessary. It helped that its industry was almost completely siloed from the one in America, and any cross-pollination between the two rackets only served to accentuate the differences. These days, those contrasts have grown significantly blurrier, thanks to the K-pop industry's intentional moves to conquer the Western market and, by proxy, the global one.
Since the days of the first-ever K-pop hit, the songcraft has largely aimed to approximate the architecture of Western hits. But by the second generation of idols in the late 2000s, there was an emerging sense of the seams between the two methods, even beyond language. The gate-crashing stars of the late 2010s iterated on those those hallmarks: topline emphasis, vocal performances that treat changeovers like choreography (often in service of literal dance steps), rap verses that adorn their host songs like costume jewelry, tectonic beat shifts and a soap opera-ish flair for spectacle. Nothing was off-limits; in fact, excess and embellishment were vocational skills. In the 2020s, those same gate-crashers — BTS, Blackpink and Twice, especially — have looked to expand their influence in America, by way of more lyrics in English, more collaborations with American stars and sanded-down songs stripped of those distinguishing traits. The rest of the industry has followed suit, with BTS' label, HYBE, at the front of the pack of corporate entities seeking a worldwide K-pop business.
Zeroing in on that goal has only accelerated questions of whether K-pop is a sound or a system, and whether a K-pop song is anything more than an idea around which a creative program is designed, one that is largely extramusical. Even in 2025, I do think there is a distinct K-pop sound: It can be heard in songs like Nmixx's trap-R&B chimera "Know About Me" or ifeye's "r u ok?" (the rare offering that seems to specifically refer to the sounds of older K-pop). But those songs increasingly feel at odds with the music more responsible for the cultural penetration of the term, and that music's efforts to become completely absorbed into the English-speaking pop paradigm.
Some K-pop songs, just in their surface-level presentation, put their cross-cultural assimilations up front. CORTIS' "FaSHioN" is a one-to-one recreation of rage rap. Le Sserafim's "Come Over" is a reimagining of a song by the British soul group Jungle. XLOV's "1&Only" is Korean dembow. These are moves that present sonic entry points as the quickest way to win over existing fandoms: Give every niche a facsimile of the thing they already like. But that kind of pantomime can only take the project so far. The true successes of K-pop expansion, as this year's Grammy slate demonstrates, are subtler about the attempted merger.
Few acts could be considered more synonymous with the sound of modern K-pop than Blackpink, and yet Rosé's "APT." not only breaks from that sonic identity, but from many of the signatures of her generation — hip-hop swagger, buzzing EDM synths, rap breakdowns as structural pillars for segmented verses — and toward something markedly more quaint, pop-rock invoking a Korean drinking game. Bruno Mars compared the song to PSY's portal-opening YouTube sensation "Gangnam Style," and he's right in the sense that both exported distinctly Korean cultural experiences, but that is where the similarities stop. "APT." is patently Korean, but not discernably K-pop.
NewJeans producer 250 once said that K-pop was just pop made by Koreans, but no one arguing in good faith would define the experimental alt-rap made by Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami, the other singers who voice the KPop Demon Hunters girl group HUNTR/X, as "K-pop," despite the relative genre fluidity of their solo work. Likewise, "APT.," which vaguely mimes the dance-punk of late aughts bands like The Ting Tings, is detached from the localized K-pop sound, its airplay-bait hooks aimed specifically at the Top 40, released on an American label with an American collaborator. If Rosé, specifically, is the thing making "APT." a K-pop song, at what point do the borders dissolve? Would Rosé doing jazz still be K-pop?
"Golden" has a leg up on "APT." in this way: It was co-written and co-produced by Ejae and 25-year YG Entertainment veteran Teddy Park, two people who build K-pop songs from scratch. In fact, they are responsible for songs I think of as quintessentially K-pop: 2NE1's "I Am the Best," BIGBANG's "Fantastic Baby," Red Velvet's "Psycho" and aespa's "Drama." No one has had more influence over what a K-pop song is than Park, and it follows that "Golden" would have that sound hardwired into its DNA. But KPop Demon Hunters is, first and foremost, a musical, and it is more a musical about K-pop than of K-pop.
Co-director Chris Appelhans has said that the movie attempts in many ways to subvert formula, but has also acknowledged "Golden" as an element that "followed the conventions of a traditional musical," operating as a classic "I want" song. The song also has writing and production credits from Mark Sonnenblick and Ian Eisendrath, known for their work on musicals for stage and screen, and its key features — the story-forward lyrics sung mostly in English and the ascendant, spotlit hook — are built toward those ends. It has more in common with the music of Encanto, treating gesturally regional pop as production design, than it does with the songs Park has worked on for YG girl groups for decades.
As a result of its many cooks, KPop Demon Hunters has a complex, sometimes contradictory view of what makes a song K-pop. There is an oppositional difference drawn between songs like "Golden" and those of the heroes' scheming rivals, the demon boy band Saja Boys. "We wanted the Saja Boys' songs to be super catchy, but slightly hollow, like there's no real soul underneath," Appelhans told Mashable, comparing HUNTR/X's catalog to more "emotionally vulnerable and honest" works such as Olivia Rodrigo's "drivers license" or Beyoncé's Lemonade. The comment struck me as odd — both because "super catchy, but slightly hollow" and "no real soul underneath" are the kinds of criticisms that have long been levied against K-pop songs more broadly, and because, sonically, the Saja Boys' songs are the most earnestly K-pop-sounding cuts in the movie. "Your Idol" is of a piece with the music made by ATEEZ, Stray Kids and Enhypen. "Soda Pop" could easily be an NCT Wish song. (It says something, too, that both of Appelhans' reference points for emotionally vulnerable and honest pop are American.)
None of this is a value judgment: "Golden" is euphoric, and the idea of injecting K-pop with the distinct creative risk of something like Lemonade has plenty of potential. It's simply an observation that, in the property most responsible for bringing K-pop to the zeitgeist, there is some internal confusion over how the music is defined. In the film's world, songs that are more prototypical are less substantial, while those that are more adapted are more "authentic," a dynamic that the good-versus-evil dichotomy of the story's conflicting idol groups can't help but reinforce. One could argue that the IRL success of "Golden" speaks to its greater effectiveness; I might counter that it's more telling of how smoothly that song integrated into the Top 40 ecosystem. (Side note: The worst-performing song from the movie's soundtrack has been the version of "Takedown" recorded by an actual K-pop group, Twice.) In a certain sense, KPop Demon Hunters makes a case for an entirely different interpretation of what K-pop is: a mirror through which culture is refracted, a means for heterogeneous storytelling, which sees any kind of Korean advancement as evolution.
That could also be your takeaway watching the Apple TV+ series KPOPPED. The show, clearly meant to be an appealing first exposure for K-pop outsiders, selects Top 40 hits from across the decades and pairs the original artists up with Korean idols, who transform them in ways meant to resemble the K-pop formula. As one YouTube commenter suggests, many of the revamps feel like karaoke — limited in their rearrangements, meaningfully devoid of what they refer to as "K-pop elements." Yet they do recognize one performance as an outlier: ATEEZ teaming up with Kylie Minogue to rework "Can't Get You Out of My Head," the arrangement of which feels a little instructive for what, under the hood of a K-pop song, makes it a K-pop song. The original "Can't Get You Out of My Head" is a daydream, hook after hook interlocked like a series of train cars, bliss points that bleed into one another and never resolve. The ATEEZ version is theatrical, brooding and baroque, full of jagged edges, surges and breakdowns. When the boys sing "set me free" in Korean, it is not with Kylie's beckoning-siren energy, but a face-melting intensity. Look beyond genre and you can find K-pop there: songcraft as melodramatic montage.
Katseye, in its few years since debuting on a reality competition, has made a different case: that K-pop is just a workflow, that its processes aren't primarily musical or indigenous, and that it was never about a sound by Koreans for the world so much as a basis for a multinational satellite network. The group's creators plugged six star hopefuls, mostly American but representing different ethnic backgrounds, into HYBE's trainee system, with the express purpose of promoting them in the American market. In this regard, Katseye is much like Santos Bravos, the boy band produced via reality series by HYBE Latin America, targeted to that ever-expanding market. Both are products of HYBE's "multi-home, multi-genre" strategy, which has begun franchising its star apparatus around the world: HYBE x Geffen is debuting another multinational girl group in 2026, Ryan Tedder is working on a "global" boy group, and chairman Bang Si-hyuk has set his sights on India next.
This is to say nothing of Girlset, an LA-based group formed by JYP Entertainment and Republic Records, or dearALICE, SM Entertainment's British boy group. The integrations are entirely aesthetic and commercial: Girlset's "Little Miss" sounds closer to Tate McCrae than K-pop. KPop Demon Hunters and "APT." aren't as far removed from the culture that birthed them, but they are on the same end of the spectrum as these offerings. K-pop is not a monolith, and this year's Grammy-nominated properties aren't representative of the whole — but they do have an outsized influence on perception, and their success will draw more of the competition in this direction. As an institution, the Recording Academy has never been on the cutting edge, but Music's Biggest Night does tell a story of where the industry at large places value.
None of this would matter if not for the feeling that something is being lost in this process — top-level K-pop sacrificing its signature qualities for the sake of broader acceptance. Initially, K-pop's scaling up was an act of importation, widening the taste and fluency of the American listener, recalibrating our musical and cultural and lyrical lexicons. The inflection point we're living through now issues far fewer challenges to a new fan's taste: The system has arrived, but the sound has moved closer to a Western one to make it happen.
There are deeper conversations to be had about aesthetics and dance, or about K-pop breathing new life into the music video as a medium. But speaking strictly of the music, it is hard not to feel the character of the thing eroding as it stretches to satisfy bodies like the Grammys. There is a sense in which you could think of KPop Demon Hunters, "APT." and Katseye as K-pop's commercial ideal: the promotional system working as intended, moving toward ubiquity and maximum profitability. It's a net positive that the parameters of who gets to be a star are being augmented, and that a talent like Ejae wasn't left to wither on the vine forever. But in the space between her old agency's "specific vision and sound" and her work on "Golden," you can hear a song-making form in jeopardy of being overwritten.
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