Music
America’s New No. 1 Song Is by a Group That Doesn’t Exist
“Golden,” the breakout hit from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, is both a throwback and a sign of the changes in how hits are made.
Photo illustration by Slate. Image via Netflix.
In the late summer of 1969, a song debuted on Billboard’s Hot 100 that would emerge as the year’s biggest hit. The final year of the ’60s had already produced some stone classics—literally: from Sly Stone to the Rolling Stones, plus the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, the 5th Dimension, and Tommy James and the Shondells. But this newer group’s hit topped all of them. And the “group” didn’t even exist.
The Archies were an animated garage-rock combo. As comic-book characters, the high schoolers of the Archie universe—including Archie, Jughead, Betty, and Veronica—date all the way back to the Second World War. But in 1968 and ’69, they were also the stars of The Archie Show, a CBS Saturday-morning TV series. The Archies, the band—made up of real-life session musicians, including singer-songwriters Ron Dante and Toni Wine—was created to promote the TV cartoon. And like the Monkees before them, the Archies scored real hits on the Billboard charts. Co-written by Brill Building songwriter Jeff Barry and future ’70s hitmaker Andy Kim, “Sugar, Sugar” sold more than 3 million copies in 1969 alone and commanded the Hot 100 for four weeks. In December, Billboard named it the year’s No. 1 song. To this day, pop critics still consider “Sugar, Sugar” the high-water mark of ’60s bubblegum pop.
Five and a half decades later, the dog days have once again been livened up by a cartoon combo serving up high-gloss bubblegum. In what has turned out to be an extremely dull 2025 musical summer, we needed a rescue—and South Korea has sent us, quite literally, some superheroes: the stars of Netflix’s smash animated movie KPop Demon Hunters, a power-vocalizing, monster-slaughtering girl-group trio who call themselves Huntr/x (stylized in all-caps as HUNTR/X and pronounced “HUN-tricks”). Like the Archies, Huntr/x does not technically exist, even though actual flesh-and-blood humans performed the group’s songs. That includes “Golden,” the soundtrack’s lead single, which hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 this week after a steady climb through most of the summer. Like the TV movie it came from—the sleeper hit of summer ’25, and now Netflix’s second-biggest movie of all time—the stirring “Golden” is a reminder that televised confections have generated some of our sturdiest hits. Synthetic pop can nourish the soul.
I’m not claiming that “Golden” is a classic on par with “Sugar, Sugar.” I’m not even sure it’s the best song on the KPDH soundtrack album—which, like its lead single, has done serious business on the American charts this summer. Currently No. 2 on the Billboard 200, the Demon Hunters soundtrack is packed with bops: No fewer than nine of its dozen songs are currently on the Hot 100,