You might not be familiar with KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s surprise animated hit movie, but if you have any kids in your household (or, indeed, any K-pop fans) they should be able to tell you what it’s all about.
There’s also a good chance that you’ve heard one of the movie’s songs, Golden, which has become a worldwide hit and transcended the Demon Hunters universe. In fact, its singers - EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami, who provide the vocals for fictional band HUNTR/X - have recently been stepping out from behind their animated avatars and performing the song as themselves.
After appearing on SNL at the weekend, they were the musical guests on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon earlier this week, with EJAE in particular (the singing voice of Rumi in the movie) showing off her impressive vocal range.
“Golden is a song that I put all my experience into, what I wanted to hear when I was training, because it’s not an easy industry,” EJAE told Billboard earlier this year. The South Korean musician was a trainee at KPop hit factory SM Entertainment for almost a decade, but left for the US after being considered too old to launch a career as a solo artist or in a band, so turned to songwriting and producing for other K-pop acts instead.
“It’s very competitive,” she says of her musical world. “Being perfect is such a big thing while training. So that part, feeling so broken inside, me not aligning and getting dropped, was part of it too. I brought that heartbreak I felt into the lyrics and when I’m singing.”
As one of Golden’s two songwriters - the other being Mark Sonnenblick - EJAE has certainly had the last laugh, but it turns out that this big power pop song came from relatively mundane beginnings.
“When I received the instrumental, I wrote [the melody] on my way to the dentist,” EJAE told Good Morning America recently, showing off the original Voice Memo to prove it. In fact, she recorded a couple of snippets, one of which would end up forming the backbone of Golden’s chorus.
“And then I brought it to Mark [Sonnenblick] and Mark’s like, ‘I feel something’, and we wrote it so fast. ‘Gonna be, gonna be Golden’ came out super fast. ‘Up, up, up it’s our moment’... that came out fast, too.
“And then, when we’re done, we’re like, ‘This is kind of a banger!’”
Indeed it is - in fact, it’s been suggested that Netflix is planning to submit Golden for Oscars consideration - but, as executive music producer Ian Eisendrath told Billboard, it could very easily have not made it into KPop Demon Hunters at all.
“Out of any song in the film, that one had the most [options] written for that spot,” he says. “It took a long, long time to find. It was literally the last song that we locked up, [we were] creating a new bridge for it in December and recording in January.”
EJAE and Sonnenblick have confirmed elsewhere that Golden’s original bridge was indeed different, but whatever back and forth took place to get to the end result, it was certainly worth the effort.
“What I’m excited about is that it’s doing it all,” says Eisendrath. “It’s a K-pop song, it’s a performance song, and then it’s got an internal monologue in the middle of it all. And people are just loving and embracing it as a pop song.”
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