Huntr/X, Ejae, Audrey Nuna & Rei Ami – Golden

Currently in the running toward dethroning Alex Warren from the top of the Hot 100…

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Al Varela: I think it’s great that an animated movie with a concept as cool as K-Pop Demon Hunters has become such a phenomenon that one of its songs became a major pop hit. It may be benefitting from a slow year for mainstream music, but it’s a unique circumstance is a shot in the arm for a slow summer. I applaud it for all that, but we’re rating these songs as songs, not phenomenons, and here’s where I become the buzzkill and say “Golden” is really mediocre. Lousy metronome beat, surface level pop songwriting, falsetto that gets pretty grating in the chorus, and is mostly saved by being generally competent and catchy. If this came from a C-list pop star who only gets attention on pop radio, I don’t know how many people would care about it. Saja Boys better. 
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Joshua Lu: If you’re going to rip off IVE, you should at least make sure you have the pipes to do so. As the notes get pushed higher and higher in the chorus of “Golden,” steadily does Ejae’s voice strain harder and harder in tandem, eventually losing all enunciation and flattening everything into mawkish mush. The parts of the song in her vocal ranges are of not much better quality, littered with platitudes and an unearned detour into melancholy in the second verse. Just go play “I Am” over the beginning of K-Pop Demon Hunters where they jump out of the plane.
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Claire Davidson: I was only vaguely aware of K-Pop Demon Hunters prior to writing this blurb, but the idea of a Netflix-backed animated film about a fictional K-pop group seemed so cynical in its fandom-baiting that I had very low expectations for its music. I’m pleased to report that I don’t hate “Golden,” thanks to some rubbery synth textures that, while largely colorless, do at least provide the inertia that makes the track’s anthemic spirit somewhat convincing. Even that thin measure of goodwill, however, can’t make up for the song’s chorus: when the hook’s inflection point is the line, “We’re going up, up, up with our voices,” why assign it to a singer who sounds so shrill in attempting to hit those notes? From there, the song falls apart, interrupting its faster clip for a piano-backed interlude that should’ve served as the track’s first verse, not its second, a narrative clumsiness that makes every ensuing lyric about overcoming hardship feel increasingly hollow. I guess it’s a credit to the songwriters behind “Golden” that the track hews so closely to the mediocre pop of the real world, but surely you don’t watch a musical to be bored by its songs.
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Iain Mew: In the film, the song serves both as introduction to the characters and then later as a recap of the film’s events, pulling off some impressive sleight of hand to get there. Rei Ami’s “I lived two lives/tried to play both sides” initially plays over a sequence of her character, the group’s lyricist, split between America and Korea. That conflict then essentially never comes up again, there just to provide a means for her to write about her bandmate’s more existential secret without knowing it, and perhaps also to give the main plot an additional resonance. Meanwhile, Ejae’s character’s inability to bring herself to sing the chorus is something to overcome. So when eventually in the full “Golden” that chorus pushes past “Euphoria” and comes out as a desperate, mushy tumble of syllables (“why are they singing ‘like I’m Barnaby’?” asked my child) the awkwardness, the fact it’s definitely Too Much, feels like the point. All of which fits with a strong understanding of how idol fandom and its narratives can work too. If anyone gets past the song’s shortcomings to become invested via its new role as an actual pop song and then watches the film, they’re pretty much following along the ideal trajectory for getting the most from it.
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Nortey Dowuona: Ejae unfortunately gets the majority of the song, and neither Audrey Nuna or Rei Ami get much time on the mic to shine, and the drum pattern is very flat and unappealing. But Ejae is a fantastic singer, I will let it slide.
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Julian Axelrod: Finding out Audrey Nuna (a rapper who I enjoy but don’t follow super closely) is in K-Pop Demon Hunters feels like discovering a talented theater actor booked a role on a Dick Wolf procedural. I’m not gonna bother with all that, but I’m glad they’re getting a bag.
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Scott Mildenhall: Autocorrect errors of our time: when they asked for this to sound “royally free”.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: We all have clichés that we lean on as critics — I, for one, all too frequently compare pop songs to the ersatz versions produced in films. Here the joke is on me; abandoned by all sense (and left wanting by the lack of passable alternate options)  the global pop public has taken on one of those ersatz takes as a de facto song of the summer. I don’t get it. “Golden” is the last decade of “pop perfection” (the legacy of “Run Away With Me” at 10: surprisingly mixed!) distilled into one flimsy container; it burns bright, sure, but every impact it makes upon me is vague, trading on the implication of a pop song that sounds like this rather than the actuality.
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Ian Mathers: Ok fine, maybe I’ll watch the movie.
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