“If you actually listen to it, there’s a sadness to it,” says the Grammy winner of her Oscar-nominated earworm.
“After getting dropped, my dream to become a singer—I let that go,” the musician, who goes by EJAE, tells Vanity Fair over Zoom. But that rejection turned out to be a “redirection,” as the Korean American singer-songwriter famously declared in her Golden Globes acceptance speech last month.
Following her failed attempt at K-pop stardom, EJAE found solace in songwriting—a decision that would eventually lead her to cowrite and perform many of the songs from the blockbuster film KPop Demon Hunters, including the Grammy-winning hit “Golden”. “I was very determined to get through the depression, and what helped me was songwriting. It was a happy accident,” she says. “I was so obsessed with it, and it was helping me so much, I gave it my all. I was desperate to be healed, and it became part of my DNA.” EJAE went on to write K-pop bangers like Red Velvet’s “Psycho” and aespa’s “Drama” and “Armageddon.” As her K-pop songwriting career started to blossom, she learned about KPop Demon Hunters in 2019 through her composer friend Daniel Rojas, who recommended her to the film’s directors Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans. At the time, no one could’ve predicted that an animated feature about pop stars battling monsters would become Netflix’s biggest movie ever, as well as a global cultural phenomenon. The project was still in its very early stages; there was no guarantee of its future success. EJAE signed on anyway. “It’s the first animated film based in Korea. Hell yeah, I’m gonna do that!” she says. “I love animation. My favorite movie is Lilo & Stitch.” She spent years working on KPop Demon Hunters, drawing heavily on her bilingual and bicultural upbringing to cowrite songs including “How It’s Done,” “Your Idol,” “What It Sounds Like,” “Prologue ,” and, of course, “Golden.” “I tried to make sure the balance was there, especially with the Korean lyrics and all,” she says. “TheBlackLabel did ‘Soda Pop,’ but for the other songs, I did all the Korean lyrics. So I think that was important—to have an understanding of both cultures in order to create something like ‘Golden’ or ‘Your Idol.’” Her fingerprints—and vocal cords—are all over the movie, even more than the most devoted KPop Demon Hunters fan might expect. She shares, for example, that she sang many of the demos for songs sung in the film by K-pop group Saja Boys, including “Your Idol.” Turns out she’s even responsible for a now iconic Saja Boys line. “No one knows this, but you know that ‘mmm yeah’ part that’s sung throughout the movie? For example, when Jinu made this idea to create a K-pop boy band, and then he poses?” she asks, raising her right arm in the air. “That ‘mmm yeah’ is actually my voice. It’s really funny, because we wrote that part for a different song. That song didn’t get through, but that part did. It’s like a harmony, but it was my voice transposed down.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/p1iCKqclz6w Kang and Appelhans wanted to incorporate traditional Korean elements into the movie’s soundtrack, so EJAE taught herself pansori, a type of traditional Korean musical storytelling, during the pandemic. In pansori, a vocalist delivers an epic tale by chanting in a raspy, guttural voice while accompanied by a drummer. Throughout Korea’s turbulent past, pansori served as an outlet for the Korean people to express their pain, sorrow and anger. In Korean, there’s a specific term for this type of generational trauma and deep-seated resentment: han. “Diving into the han, which is such a big part of the culture, was amazing,” says EJAE. “It’s interesting how a lot of people compare pansori with rap, because you’re kind of freestyling with this rhythm of your pain and your trials and tribulations.” As a singer-songwriter, she tried to create her own modernized version of pansori for KPop Demon Hunters—the most obvious example of which is found in “Prologue ,” a track she wrote with composer Marcelo Zarvos. The piece plays in the background at the beginning of the film, and EJAE can be heard singing in an intense vibrato that’s a trademark sound of pansori. But even a pop song like “Golden” reflects some of what she learned about pansori and about tapping into her han. Although EJAE sings as Rumi throughout the film, her emotional delivery in “Golden” feels particularly personal—as if she’s expressing her own journey of overcoming pain and adversity. “The way I belt out in pansori, I kind of use a similar technique —feeling the han, because a lot of pansori is very sad,” says EJAE. “So I think naturally, I brought that in ‘Golden’ because, if you actually listen to it, there’s a sadness to it. I do that in my singing because it’s more of Rumi trying to express her desperation to seal the Honmoon”—the magical barrier that protects the human world from demons. “She’s reaching out with her voice, and there’s a lot of pressure she’s under. So that’s where I would bring in the pansori.” “Golden” was the last—and most important—song to be added to the film’s soundtrack. It simultaneously had to capture the emotional struggle of each HUNTR/X member and the group’s collective quest to seal the Honmoon. “Our directors were very specific in what they wanted and gave us extensive guidelines,” EJAE says. “TheBlackLabel created this beautiful track. Maggie told me the moment she heard the track, she cried, because it felt exactly like what they wanted in the scene. That’s rare. Then when I received it, I felt it too. It was like this beautiful bittersweetness of hope.” EJAE says that although she came up with the melody pretty quickly, it took months to get “Golden” just right for the film. “Because this is not just about the song: it’s about line distribution. How many seconds do we have in the scene? Also, once they cut the scene, we have to make sure it’s not awkwardly cutting off in the song. So it took a while. I think we had like 10 different versions of ‘Golden’ specifically.” The final version has already landed the songwriting team a slew of accolades, including a Critics Choice award, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy. It also scored an Oscar nomination and is one of only two original song nominees that will be performed live at this year’s Oscars. “Golden” is the first K-pop song to be recognized at the Oscars, as well as the first to get a Grammy—though some viewers take issue with characterizing it as K-pop in the first place. Some have argued that “Golden” and many of the other KPop Demon Hunters tracks shouldn’t count because they’re written mostly in English—though as K-pop has grown its international fanbase, many K-pop songs are now sung mostly or entirely in English. “It is K-pop,” EJAE says. “Literally, the characters are K-pop idols. I got hired to write K-pop songs.” She points out that the producers for “Golden” include Teddy Park, IDO and 24 of TheBlackLabel, the powerhouse Korean record label and entertainment agency that Park cofounded. “They’re legendary K-pop writers.” “Yes, there aren’t as many Korean lyrics. The songs are part of the storyline, so the lyrics have to be understandable,” she continues. “It was all very strategic with where to put Korean so that doesn’t interfere with the storyline, and that’s why there was more English. So it is a K-pop song, and it’s also a pop song.” “Golden” is also a song global audiences can relate to. Fans of all ages, from New York to Singapore to Buenos Aires, have made innumerable videos of themselves belting it out; the blockbuster track has topped both the Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard Global 200 charts, and remained on them for a combined 26 weeks . These days, things are looking pretty golden for EJAE. Shortly after taking home her Grammy earlier this month, she released her new single, “Time After Time”: a wistful, euphoric dance-pop number about being unable to move on from a past relationship. It’s her second solo release following her 2025 debut solo track, “In Another World.” She’s also set to marry her fiancé, music producer Sam Kim, in the fall—though she points out that they haven’t set a wedding date yet, despite reports claiming that the two will tie the knot in November. “It was Korean ajummas talking! Korean parents, I swear!” she says, laughing. “Nothing’s official. I want people to know, this was literally just social media spreading things. We are getting married in the fall, but there’s no exact date. We’re still figuring it out.” Ever since the release of KPop Demon Hunters, unsubstantiated rumors like these have dogged EJAE—an inevitable byproduct of her newfound fame. She admits she’s still getting used to it. “This is all new to me,” she says. “Back then, I was just a songwriter—a normal person, you know, not a public figure.” In “Golden,” the women of HUNTR/X sing about finally shining like they were always meant to be. EJAE’s rise from a failed K-pop trainee to a global star was forged over years of quiet perseverance—the kind that led her to stay on KPop Demon Hunters through to the end, and emerge as one of the key architects of its success. “This is my motto with anything: Do your frickin’ best,” EJAE says. “Give it your 110%. Never half-ass anything.”
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