Does HUNTR/X — the beloved fictional trio at the center of Netflix’s Kpop Demon Hunters — count as a real band? Technically, yes: though the members of this girl group aren’t actually real, their music is written and performed by some of the biggest names in the K-pop industry. Flesh-and-blood writers, singers, and rappers crafted the kind of hits that have been dominating the charts for decades, pushing artists like BLACKPINK and TWICE into the stratosphere. Those hits just so happen to provide the soundtrack for an animated film.
But the popularity of said film has allowed a fictional group to go further than those beloved K-pop acts ever have. Just a few short months after its debut, Kpop Demon Hunters is now a worldwide phenomenon, with its top track, “Golden,” conquering the charts IRL.
K-pop has been steadily gaining a foothold in Western media for the past decade, and groups like BTS especially have enjoyed the lion’s share of that popularity. Of the nine Billboard #1 hits that belong to K-pop acts, the group and its individual members are responsible for all but one. HUNTR/X recently scored the ninth #1 hit with “Golden,” making EJAE, Audrey Nuna and REI AMI — who perform as the group in Kpop Demon Hunters — the first South Korean female act to land the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
“Golden” isn’t the first pop hit from an animated movie: in 2022, Disney scored a similar win with “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” an earworm from Encanto that blew up on TikTok and later became a radio hit. But this particular win is an interesting one, as it sheds a real light on the disparity that K-pop acts still face. It’s shocking that HUNTR/X is the first Korean girl group to land at #1 on the Billboard chart, given the popularity of BLACKPINK and their contemporaries. If nothing else, this speaks to the true fervor for KPop Demon Hunters — the film and its groups may not be real in the traditional sense, but the demand from audiences is becoming impossible to ignore.
