K-Pop in 2025: What ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ and NewJeans Tell Us About the Genre

The genre peaked in terms of global awareness with “KPop Demon Hunters,” while the industry’s most promising new act was mired in a legal morass.

This year, from a distance, the cultural phenomenon that revealed the most about K-pop’s place in the global zeitgeist was the Netflix animated film “KPop Demon Hunters.” Among the most consumed cultural products of 2025, this parable about good and evil — framed as a tug of war between competing K-pop groups — became the most watched film in Netflix history, and its songs topped the charts here and abroad. It seemed to clearly cement the universal embrace of K-pop as a sound, style and milieu.

But take a slightly closer look, and the fissures beneath this top-level triumph become evident. The true gauge of K-pop’s power, and the shape of its future growth, was playing out between lawyers in the struggle between NewJeans, the most innovative group of the past few years, and its label, Ador, a subsidiary of the entertainment conglomerate Hybe, over claims of workplace hostility and creative sabotage. The members of NewJeans tried to break their contract, but in October a South Korean court upheld its validity. In November, the label announced the return of two of the group’s members; the other three announced their intention to return soon after, though no announcements about the full group have been made since. NewJeans’s contract is set to expire in 2029.

K-pop is over three decades old as a form, and in the past 10 years has asserted itself worldwide, remaking pop music in the macro by out-innovating its competitors. The K-pop industry is highly restrictive, highly regulated creatively and largely managed top-down, led by a handful of entertainment conglomerates that have attempted to streamline and scale the creation of pop stars. But K-pop also has become a playground for pop experimentalists and eccentrics, and for some groups, NewJeans among them, musical innovation became crucial to their thrill.

Originality of that sort, however, is almost impossible to manufacture at scale. And so 2025 has been a year that underscored the tension between K-pop as an industry and K-pop as an art form, testing its scale and durability as a cultural force.

“KPop Demon Hunters” cleanly distills what it took to get to this point. (And it proves that K-pop is big enough to be gently parodied.) In the film, a girl group, Huntr/x, is tasked with protecting the world — its fans, really — from the encroachment of evil as literalized through zombielike demons, who are sophisticated enough to present as an equally compelling pop group, Saja Boys. The songs are lithe and peppy, and the frenzied relationship between artists and the fans who adore them is played as lightly silly, as if underscoring how fandom can be a force of unquestioning allegiance and dubious good.

Read broadly, the plot can symbolize the tension between manufactured pop and artistic freedom, or serve as a cautionary tale about how mass media dulls the receptors of its most voracious consumers, leaving them susceptible to manipulation.

The movie is also, simply, an undeniable smash. Several of its songs became fixtures at or near the peak of the Hot 100 — Huntr/x’s “Golden” topped the chart for eight weeks, and is also nominated at the 2026 Grammys for song of the year, among other categories.

This sign of global visibility is a logical outgrowth of how the last decade has unfolded. It owes heavily to the rise and dominance of BTS, the boy band that became the genre’s true global breakout in the 2010s, and whose members have recently completed mandatory military service. In BTS, K-pop found unimpeachable ambassadors — musically nimble, personable and doggedly dedicated to craft. The biggest K-pop story of next year will be the group’s return to recording and touring, which will inject revenue and energy into the industry, but won’t be much more than a bandage atop an unhealed wound: The scale of the group’s power has been essentially impossible to replicate, and the system that created it has been fragmenting, sometimes for the better.

The most literal example of this is the rise of Katseye, a girl group whose assembly by Hybe and Geffen Records was recounted on “Pop Star Academy: Katseye,” a reality show that streamed on Netflix. It is global by design, with members from various countries, and largely performs in English.

Part of the charm of Katseye is the way in which it chafes against K-pop formalities. The group’s best hit, “Gnarly,” is a chaotic industrial shredder, and “Gabriela” is cheekily melodramatic. The group’s members — some of them at least — are comfortable with profanity. They starred in a saucy Gap ad. On its recent live tour, Katseye blended the metronomic skill set imprinted onto its members by their training with a sense of abandon and mild chaos that would typically have no place at a K-pop performance.

This heralds an era in which K-pop is an influence, a starting point, but perhaps not a destination. It’s a move echoed by some of the bigger stars of the genre’s last wave — for example, Rosé, of Blackpink, whose collaboration with Bruno Mars, “Apt.,” came out in late 2024 but continued to dominate pop charts well into this year. That was one of numerous collaborations putting K-pop stars in partnership with artists from other genres, an indicator of widening acceptance and also increased tolerance for musical risk: Jisoo and Zayn; J-Hope with Don Toliver and Pharrell Williams; J-Hope with GloRilla, Seventeen and PinkPantheress; Jennie and Doechii.

There’s also a new reality competition on Apple TV premised upon these mutually beneficial alliances: “KPopped,” in which English-language pop stars like Spice Girls, Boyz II Men and Kylie Minogue team with established K-pop groups to remake their signature songs in K-pop style.

These kinds of collaborations take the musical importance of K-pop as a given, but they are also the sort of creative bursts that tend to happen once a genre has reached an era of saturation, and needs new oxygen to thrive.

Of all the new K-pop acts of the 2020s, the internal candidate most likely to expand the reach and sound of the genre has been NewJeans. From 2022 to 2024, it proposed a realignment of K-pop along looser and more musical lines, with songs that were gentle, sophisticated and sweet, while never spilling over to saccharine. But for the last year, the quintet has been navigating contentious legal proceedings over the validity of its contract, and the ouster of Min Hee-jin, its creative director and the chief executive of its imprint, Ador.

It attempted to rebrand as NJX, and performed one concert under that name in Hong Kong in March, but has essentially been silenced and musically sidelined while its claims were assessed in court.

The specter of the NewJeans debacle hangs over the industry both from business and artistic standpoints. But a NewJeans reboot under these conditions is unlikely to be as radical or satisfying as its earlier burst of creativity, whether because of the enforced split from Min, who’d guided the group from its beginning, or the near impossibility of creative freedom under fraught business circumstances.

The eventual outcome of the face-off will indicate whether K-pop as an industry is interested in aesthetics or simply scale, bottom-up innovation or top-down domination.

In the meanwhile, K-pop’s mainstream is trapped in a creative cul-de-sac — groups like Stray Kids, Twice, Enhypen and Seventeen are commercially thriving, but the musical frameworks they’re deploying are redundant and increasingly dull. (A promising outlier: “Cerulean Verge,” a solo EP by Wendy of the girl group Red Velvet, full of bright and slightly cheeky ’80s pop.)

More important, though, there is ample innovation happening in South Korean music outside of the conglomerate system. Much of the best feels as if it’s in an unspoken dialogue with the K-pop that for many years hungrily ate up influences from abroad, and then assembled them into an unlikely and overwhelming new package. That maximalism had a lot in common with the hyperpop production that began to rise to dominance in the late 2010s, and which has found new life in a crop of young Korean artists — Effie, the Deep, Kimj and more — who are making some of the most provocative pop of today.

It’s the sound of a generation of path breakers raised under a suffocating system that they wish to both exist outside of and also indirectly comment on, if only to eye-roll. It has shards of K-pop bombast buried deep within, but what’s built atop it is novel, challenging and utterly modern. As the K-pop industry fends off fatigue and anxiety from within, it may have already inadvertently given birth to the sound that will upend it.

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