‘Golden’ Wins Again at the World Soundtrack Awards, Completing KPop Demon Hunters’ Historic Sweep

GHENT, BELGIUM

The trophy case needed another shelf. On Saturday night, “Golden” — the K-pop anthem performed by the fictional girl group at the heart of Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters — won Best Original Song at the 26th World Soundtrack Awards, adding the screen-music world’s top honor to a haul that already includes an Oscar, a Grammy and a Golden Globe.

The award was presented at the WSA Ceremony and Concert, the closing event of three days of talks, workshops and masterclasses at Music Centre De Bijloke in the historic heart of Ghent, with the Brussels Philharmonic performing under conductor Dirk Brossé. The evening honored guest of honor Hildur Guðnadóttir and lifetime achievement recipient Trevor Jones, but the song category belonged to the year’s most decorated film song.

The winners, per one report, were not on hand to collect — which is only fitting for a song whose fictional performers are animated characters. The real voices behind HUNTR/X — EJAE, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami, who sing for Rumi, Mira and Zoey — have spent the year turning what could have been a cartoon soundtrack into a genuine pop takeover.

A sweep that started in January

To understand how big the Ghent win is, you have to rewind the awards calendar. “Golden” took Best Original Song — Motion Picture at the 83rd Golden Globe Awards in January, won the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media, and then made history at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, becoming the first K-pop song ever to win an Oscar for Best Original Song. The film itself won Best Animated Feature the same night, making director Maggie Kang the first female Asian director to take that prize.

The Oscar win came with a quirk worth knowing: with seven credited writers, it set the record for the most recipients for a Best Original Song winner ever, and Academy rules limiting the number of trophies to four in the category meant the team shared a single statuette. EJAE, who provides Rumi’s singing voice, also became the first voice of an animated character to win in the category.

The song’s commercial run was just as wild. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks last summer — one of the longest-running animated-film chart-toppers in history — and the KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack became the first Netflix soundtrack to reach number one on Billboard’s Top Soundtracks chart in around two years, per Billboard and NPR Music.

“Rejection is redirection”

The story behind the song has resonated as much as the song itself. EJAE spent roughly a decade training as a K-pop idol before being told her voice wasn’t good enough. Accepting the Golden Globe in January, she told the audience “rejection is redirection,” closing with a line from the song itself, per ABC Audio.

“Growing up, people teased me if I said I liked K-pop, but now everyone is singing lyrics in Korean.”— EJAE, accepting the Academy Award for Best Original Song, via Aju Press

At the Oscars, director Maggie Kang’s speech landed just as hard: “Thank you to the Academy and to all fans who got us here. And for those of you who look like me, I’m so sorry that it took us so long to see us in a movie like this. But it is here. And that means that the next generations don’t have to go longing. This is for Korea and for Koreans everywhere.”

The night’s other honors

British composer Daniel Pemberton was named Film Composer of the Year at the Ghent ceremony for a prolific run including Project Hail Mary, The Drama, The Bad Guys 2 and Masters of the Universe — his third win at the ceremony, having also taken the top prize in 2021 and Discovery of the Year in 2014. Television Composer of the Year went to Jeff Russo for Alien: Earth, Cape Fear and Citadel Season 2. Hannah Peel took Discovery of the Year, and the Public Choice Award went to Kevin Smithers’ score for the Mexican stop-motion feature Soy Frankelda.

What comes next

The song’s victory in Ghent matters because the World Soundtrack Awards are an institution dedicated exclusively to music for cinema, television and games — a jury of screen-music specialists, not a popularity contest. Winning there confirms what the commercial numbers already said: “Golden” long ago stopped being a movie song and became a pop standard.

And the story isn’t over. Netflix has officially confirmed a KPop Demon Hunters sequel, and the film joins the Criterion Collection on Nov. 3 as Spine No. 1333 in 4K UHD and Blu-ray — a rare canonization for an animated streaming hit. The question now isn’t whether “Golden” can win anything else. It’s whether any film song will ever match a calendar year that ran Golden Globes to Grammys to Oscars to Ghent.

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