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In a breakthrough 12 months like no different, crossover Ok-pop just like the woman group Katseye, Rosé’s single “APT.” and Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters has secured nods in main Grammy classes and new peak of visibility.

Pictures by Julian Tune, John V. Esparza, Netflix/Illustration by Jackie Lay

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Pictures by Julian Tune, John V. Esparza, Netflix/Illustration by Jackie Lay

In 2003, at 11 years previous, Kim Eun-jae signed with the Korean company SM Leisure as a trainee, hoping to rise via the required steps to develop into a Ok-pop idol. She labored for the corporate for over a decade: training earlier than college or into the night time, doing vocal and dance coaching, taking language and appearing lessons. She watched her friends get known as up for teams like SHINee and f(x), however her personal debut by no means got here. When Kim, now identified professionally as Ejae, was lastly dropped by the company in 2015, the reason she bought was easy: This was a enterprise. As she just lately advised the Philippine media community ABS-CBN, “SM has a really particular imaginative and prescient and sonic sound and I simply did not actually match that.”

Ejae’s story might simply have ended there. “I had deep emotional wounds associated to idols and Ok-pop,” she admitted in the identical interview. “I resented the trade quite a bit.” However after graduating from the Clive Davis Institute at NYU Tisch, she discovered her option to a behind-the-scenes position. It was an SM songwriting camp that first introduced her again to the trade, and she or he continued to work in its periphery, scoring writing credit for the teams Pink Velvet, Twice and aespa, and dealing in animation, the place she met the movie and TV composer Daniel Rojas. Rojas was the primary musician recruited to work on the Netflix animated musical KPop Demon Hunters, and he rapidly beneficial Ejae to co-creator Maggie Kang.

After listening to her preliminary demos, the administrators determined to rent the previous would-be idol — not merely as a songwriter, however because the singing voice for the movie’s lead character, the purple-haired pop star Rumi. Ejae is without doubt one of the co-writers and producers behind “Golden,” the standout hit that dominated the Billboard Sizzling 100 in 2025 and is now nominated for the Grammy for music of the 12 months. In essentially the most roundabout method attainable, an company castoff had develop into the soul and voice of Ok-pop’s best cultural phenomenon but.

KPop Demon Hunters is considered one of a number of properties born of the trendy Ok-pop trade to be nominated by the Recording Academy this 12 months. Blackpink member Rosé‘s Bruno Mars collab “APT.” is nominated for music and document of the 12 months; each “Golden” and “APT.” are competing in the perfect pop duo / group efficiency class; and the multi-ethnic sextet Katseye is up for finest new artist. These should not the primary nods for Ok-pop on the ceremony — BTS has flirted with finest pop duo / group efficiency since 2021 — however collectively, they signify a Western embrace of the shape that feels unprecedented. (Rosé, for starters, is the primary lead Ok-pop artist to be nominated in any of the “large 4” award classes.) And in so doing, these developments level to a much bigger query, one embodied by Ejae’s anti-idol profession trajectory: After we discuss a “Ok-pop music” now, what precisely will we imply?

The size of that “Ok” have lengthy been a subject of inquiry: whether or not Ok-pop refers to a style in its personal proper, the company system that develops the artists, or merely a nationwide designation. For many of the music’s historical past, the consensus was easy: Ok-pop songs have been simply pop songs sung primarily in Korean, and that was the one distinction vital. It helped that its trade was virtually utterly siloed from the one in America, and any cross-pollination between the 2 rackets solely served to intensify the variations. Lately, these contrasts have grown considerably blurrier, due to the Ok-pop trade’s intentional strikes to overcome the Western market and, by proxy, the worldwide one.

For the reason that days of the first-ever Ok-pop hit, the songcraft has largely aimed to approximate the structure of Western hits. However by the second technology of idols within the late 2000s, there was an rising sense of the seams between the 2 strategies, even past language. The gate-crashing stars of the late 2010s iterated on these these hallmarks: topline emphasis, vocal performances that deal with changeovers like choreography (typically in service of literal dance steps), rap verses that adorn their host songs like costume jewellery, tectonic beat shifts and a cleaning soap opera-ish aptitude for spectacle. Nothing was off-limits; the truth is, extra and embellishment have been vocational abilities. Within the 2020s, those self same gate-crashers — BTS, Blackpink and Twice, particularly — have appeared to increase their affect in America, by the use of extra lyrics in English, extra collaborations with American stars and sanded-down songs stripped of these distinguishing traits. The remainder of the trade has adopted go well with, with BTS’ label, HYBE, on the entrance of the pack of company entities searching for a worldwide Ok-pop enterprise.

Zeroing in on that aim has solely accelerated questions of whether or not Ok-pop is a sound or a system, and whether or not a Ok-pop music is something greater than an thought round which a inventive program is designed, one that’s largely extramusical. Even in 2025, I do suppose there’s a distinct Ok-pop sound: It may be heard in songs like Nmixx’s trap-R&B chimera “Know About Me” or ifeye’s “r u okay?” (the uncommon providing that appears to particularly seek advice from the sounds of older Ok-pop). However these songs more and more really feel at odds with the music extra chargeable for the cultural penetration of the time period, and that music’s efforts to develop into utterly absorbed into the English-speaking pop paradigm.

Some Ok-pop songs, simply of their surface-level presentation, put their cross-cultural assimilations up entrance. CORTIS’ “FaSHioN” is a one-to-one recreation of rage rap. Le Sserafim’s “Come Over” is a reimagining of a music by the British soul group Jungle. XLOV’s “1&Solely” is Korean dembow. These are strikes that current sonic entry factors because the quickest option to win over present fandoms: Give each area of interest a facsimile of the factor they already like. However that form of pantomime can solely take the undertaking to this point. The true successes of Ok-pop enlargement, as this 12 months’s Grammy slate demonstrates, are subtler concerning the tried merger.

Few acts might be thought-about extra synonymous with the sound of contemporary Ok-pop than Blackpink, and but Rosé’s “APT.” not solely breaks from that sonic id, however from most of the signatures of her technology — hip-hop swagger, buzzing EDM synths, rap breakdowns as structural pillars for segmented verses — and towards one thing markedly extra quaint, pop-rock invoking a Korean ingesting recreation. Bruno Mars in contrast the music to PSY‘s portal-opening YouTube sensation “Gangnam Fashion,” and he is proper within the sense that each exported distinctly Korean cultural experiences, however that’s the place the similarities cease. “APT.” is patently Korean, however not discernably Ok-pop.

NewJeans producer 250 as soon as stated that Ok-pop was simply pop made by Koreans, however nobody arguing in good religion would outline the experimental alt-rap made by Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami, the opposite singers who voice the KPop Demon Hunters woman group HUNTR/X, as “Ok-pop,” regardless of the relative style fluidity of their solo work. Likewise, “APT.,” which vaguely mimes the dance-punk of late aughts bands like The Ting Tings, is indifferent from the localized Ok-pop sound, its airplay-bait hooks aimed particularly on the Prime 40, launched on an American label with an American collaborator. If Rosé, particularly, is the factor making “APT.” a Ok-pop music, at what level do the borders dissolve? Would Rosé doing jazz nonetheless be Ok-pop?

“Golden” has a leg up on “APT.” on this method: It was co-written and co-produced by Ejae and 25-year YG Leisure veteran Teddy Park, two individuals who construct Ok-pop songs from scratch. In actual fact, they’re chargeable for songs I consider as quintessentially Ok-pop: 2NE1’s “I Am the Greatest,” BIGBANG’s “Implausible Child,” Pink Velvet’s “Psycho” and aespa’s “Drama.” Nobody has had extra affect over what a Ok-pop music is than Park, and it follows that “Golden” would have that sound hardwired into its DNA. However KPop Demon Hunters is, in the beginning, a musical, and it’s extra a musical about Ok-pop than of Ok-pop.

Co-director Chris Appelhans has stated that the film makes an attempt in some ways to subvert method, however has additionally acknowledged “Golden” as a component that “adopted the conventions of a conventional musical,” working as a traditional “I would like” music. The music additionally has writing and manufacturing credit from Mark Sonnenblick and Ian Eisendrath, identified for his or her work on musicals for stage and display screen, and its key options — the story-forward lyrics sung principally in English and the ascendant, spotlit hook — are constructed towards these ends. It has extra in frequent with the music of Encanto, treating gesturally regional pop as manufacturing design, than it does with the songs Park has labored on for YG woman teams for many years.

Because of its many cooks, KPop Demon Hunters has a fancy, generally contradictory view of what makes a music Ok-pop. There may be an oppositional distinction drawn between songs like “Golden” and people of the heroes’ scheming rivals, the demon boy band Saja Boys. “We wished the Saja Boys’ songs to be tremendous catchy, however barely hole, like there is not any actual soul beneath,” Appelhans advised Mashable, evaluating HUNTR/X’s catalog to extra “emotionally weak and sincere” works corresponding to Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” or Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The remark struck me as odd — each as a result of “tremendous catchy, however barely hole” and “no actual soul beneath” are the sorts of criticisms which have lengthy been levied in opposition to Ok-pop songs extra broadly, and since, sonically, the Saja Boys’ songs are essentially the most earnestly Ok-pop-sounding cuts within the film. “Your Idol” is of a chunk with the music made by ATEEZ, Stray Children and Enhypen. “Soda Pop” might simply be an NCT Want music. (It says one thing, too, that each of Appelhans’ reference factors for emotionally weak and sincere pop are American.)

None of it is a worth judgment: “Golden” is euphoric, and the concept of injecting Ok-pop with the distinct inventive danger of one thing like Lemonade has loads of potential. It is merely an commentary that, within the property most chargeable for bringing Ok-pop to the zeitgeist, there’s some inner confusion over how the music is outlined. Within the movie’s world, songs which might be extra prototypical are much less substantial, whereas these which might be extra tailored are extra “genuine,” a dynamic that the good-versus-evil dichotomy of the story’s conflicting idol teams can not help however reinforce. One might argue that the IRL success of “Golden” speaks to its larger effectiveness; I would counter that it is extra telling of how easily that music built-in into the Prime 40 ecosystem. (Facet be aware: The worst-performing music from the film’s soundtrack has been the model of “Takedown” recorded by an precise Ok-pop group, Twice.) In a sure sense, KPop Demon Hunters makes a case for a wholly totally different interpretation of what Ok-pop is: a mirror via which tradition is refracted, a way for heterogeneous storytelling, which sees any form of Korean development as evolution.

That is also your takeaway watching the Apple TV+ collection KPOPPED. The present, clearly meant to be an interesting first publicity for Ok-pop outsiders, selects Prime 40 hits from throughout the many years and pairs the unique artists up with Korean idols, who remodel them in methods meant to resemble the Ok-pop method. As one YouTube commenter suggests, most of the revamps really feel like karaoke — restricted of their rearrangements, meaningfully devoid of what they seek advice from as “Ok-pop parts.” But they do acknowledge one efficiency as an outlier: ATEEZ teaming up with Kylie Minogue to transform “Cannot Get You Out of My Head,” the association of which feels just a little instructive for what, beneath the hood of a Ok-pop music, makes it a Ok-pop music. The unique “Cannot Get You Out of My Head” is a daydream, hook after hook interlocked like a collection of practice vehicles, bliss factors that bleed into each other and by no means resolve. The ATEEZ model is theatrical, brooding and baroque, stuffed with jagged edges, surges and breakdowns. When the boys sing “set me free” in Korean, it isn’t with Kylie’s beckoning-siren vitality, however a face-melting depth. Look past style and you will discover Ok-pop there: songcraft as melodramatic montage.

Katseye, in its few years since debuting on a actuality competitors, has made a distinct case: that Ok-pop is only a workflow, that its processes aren’t primarily musical or indigenous, and that it was by no means a few sound by Koreans for the world a lot as a foundation for a multinational satellite tv for pc community. The group’s creators plugged six star hopefuls, principally American however representing totally different ethnic backgrounds, into HYBE’s trainee system, with the specific goal of selling them within the American market. On this regard, Katseye is very similar to Santos Bravos, the boy band produced by way of actuality collection by HYBE Latin America, focused to that ever-expanding market. Each are merchandise of HYBE’s “multi-home, multi-genre” technique, which has begun franchising its star equipment all over the world: HYBE x Geffen is debuting one other multinational woman group in 2026, Ryan Tedder is engaged on a “world” boy group, and chairman Bang Si-hyuk has set his sights on India subsequent.

That is to say nothing of Girlset, an LA-based group fashioned by JYP Leisure and Republic Information, or dearALICE, SM Leisure’s British boy group. The integrations are solely aesthetic and industrial: Girlset’s “Little Miss” sounds nearer to Tate McCrae than Ok-pop. KPop Demon Hunters and “APT.” aren’t as far faraway from the tradition that birthed them, however they’re on the identical finish of the spectrum as these choices. Ok-pop is just not a monolith, and this 12 months’s Grammy-nominated properties aren’t consultant of the entire — however they do have an outsized affect on notion, and their success will draw extra of the competitors on this route. As an establishment, the Recording Academy has by no means been on the innovative, however Music’s Largest Evening does inform a narrative of the place the trade at massive locations worth.

None of this might matter if not for the sensation that one thing is being misplaced on this course of — top-level Ok-pop sacrificing its signature qualities for the sake of broader acceptance. Initially, Ok-pop’s scaling up was an act of importation, widening the style and fluency of the American listener, recalibrating our musical and cultural and lyrical lexicons. The inflection level we’re residing via now points far fewer challenges to a brand new fan’s style: The system has arrived, however the sound has moved nearer to a Western one to make it occur.

There are deeper conversations available about aesthetics and dance, or about Ok-pop respiratory new life into the music video as a medium. However talking strictly of the music, it’s onerous to not really feel the character of the factor eroding because it stretches to fulfill our bodies just like the Grammys. There’s a sense during which you can consider KPop Demon Hunters, “APT.” and Katseye as Ok-pop’s industrial excellent: the promotional system working as supposed, transferring towards ubiquity and most profitability. It is a web constructive that the parameters of who will get to be a star are being augmented, and {that a} expertise like Ejae wasn’t left to wither on the vine ceaselessly. However within the house between her previous company’s “particular imaginative and prescient and sound” and her work on “Golden,” you’ll be able to hear a song-making type in jeopardy of being overwritten.