After a 2024 summer dominated by moments like Charli xcx’s BRAT phenomenon and the “me espresso” of Sabrina Carpenter, the pop music of 2025 has been… lackluster to say the least. While 2025 releases by the likes of country it-bro Morgan Wallen and Hype-House-member-turned-Mumford-and-Son Alex Warren have sat stagnant in the Billboard Hot 100 top 10, songs like Teddy Swims’ “Lose Control” haven’t left the top 10 in over a full year. That is absolutely unprecedented when looking at chart history!
However, at the top of the charts is the sight of something even stranger. As of the last week of August, two Korean pop groups, HUNTR/X and Saja Boys, each have two predominantly English-language songs sitting comfortably in the top 10, the former of which has the number one song in the country with “Golden.” The catch? Neither group is real.
HUNTR/X are the heroes and Saja Boys the villains of KPop Demon Hunters, a 2025 animated movie that just became the most streamed Netflix movie of all time. It is the first movie to ever chart four songs in the top 10 at once; a movie soundtrack has not had this much chart notoriety since the times of Grease and Saturday Night Fever. The presence of four bubbly, infectious pop songs from a MOVIE of all places in a chart dominated by country hits and raspy ballads is an anomaly, to say the least. An anomaly that I had to see for myself.
A few days before coming back to campus, I went to the Jersey Shore and ended up on the beach in front of a family with three young children who brought an FM radio to soundtrack their day. When the aforementioned chart topper “Golden” came onto the hit radio station, the dad sarcastically said, “Oh, here’s that song from that movie you watched a million times.”
Upon first watch, I saw how kids like them were watching KPop Demon Hunters over and over again, just as its insane rewatch numbers suggest. Kids are watching this movie, again, again, and again, and playing the songs on their iPads again, again, and again. And again. I pictured myself as a little kid watching The Spongebob Squarepants Movie or Despicable Me on DVD until I had every scene memorized, and KPop Demon Hunters has definitely filled this niche for the next generation.
What is KPop Demon Hunters about? Demon hunters… who make K-pop. You probably could have never guessed. In short, there have been unseen demons across the world for hundreds of years, and each generation has a set of musical Hunters tasked with killing these demons while protecting the Honmoon (Korean for “soul gate”) to prevent these demons from capturing the souls of every living human. Rumi, Mira, and Zoey, the girl group known as HUNTR/X, make up the biggest band on the planet while secretly carrying out this mission. Seeing this cultural dominance, the demons fight back by sending up five of their own to create Saja Boys, a boy band tasked with making even catchier music and taking all of HUNTR/X’s fans to bring to their demise. It’s relentlessly fun.
Without giving too much of the plot away (very minor spoiler warnings ahead), there were three aspects of the movie that made me realize why this movie has been such a cultural phenomenon.
Up first is the animation. KPop Demon Hunters is a Sony Pictures Animation film, a studio that, in the past decade, has most notably produced the Spider-Man Spider-verse series, which is credited with spearheading a vibrant, comic-book animation style. The animation of KPop Demon Hunters follows suit, and it gives the movie an incredible amount of character. I love when an animated movie isn’t afraid to use its animation to its advantage, and it makes characters like Gwi-Ma (the supervillain head of the demons), Derpy (the blue supernatural tiger), and even the members of the bands themselves shine. The subtle details in the fight sequence movements, the precise every move of Saja Boys, and the genuinely funny faces HUNTR/X makes when they are angry or slurping noodles are my personal favorite moments.
Of course, you can’t mention KPop Demon Hunters without its soundtrack. Just like the machine of an industry that manufactures hundreds of Korean pop hits, the songs in this movie are so catchy that you cannot help but see the dollar signs floating into some executive’s pocket. This is especially true for Saja Boys, whose literal whole purpose in music making is to burst on the scene and control the masses. Their debut single “Soda Pop” is just as fizzy and bubbly as its namesake, but my favorite song of theirs was “Your Idol,” which, when paired with its respective movie scene, is genuinely kind of menacing. Saja Boys have summoned all of HUNTR/X’s fans into a sold-out stadium. With this song, they’re revealing their demon identities by declaring “I’ma be your idol.” There’s a mix of English, Korean, and even Latin, showing how a perfectly engineered pop song can be so pristine that it’s sinister. HUNTR/X also has their fair share of megahits. “Golden” is the most authentically catchy tune in the movie, and “Takedown” makes for an entertaining diss at their newfound Saja Boy enemies. In regards to the plot, “Free,” the duet between Rumi and Jinu (the two bands’ leads), is unique in that it is a song shared in a moment between characters rather than projected to the fictional masses. It’s definitely a standout.
What by far surprised me the most about KPop Demon Hunters, however, was just how enjoyably it portrayed music fan culture on screen. In the music scene, the sheer impressionability of online superfandom (what has become known as “stan culture”) has grown exponentially over the past decade, much of which is thanks to K-pop and its ability to engage fans unlike most other genres. People are encouraged to pick favorite members, learn chants for concerts, and watch their favorite artist’s next moves like a clock. This has become a form of entertainment pretty exclusively tied to real life, and KPop Demon Hunters successfully explores that in a fictional setting. The fans are absolutely a character, and the movie does a great job of humanizing them and showing the community and fulfillment that so many people find in music today.
Is KPop Demon Hunters a phenomenon worth embracing? I believe so! It will likely go down as a decade-defining film of the 2020s in just how timely its subject matter feels. Besides, in my opinion, it’s good for the soul to have some legitimately great pop songs brainwash you for three minutes every now and then. And if you don’t think so, you’re probably lying to yourself a little. :)
Photo from Republic Records
