Golden Wins Best Original Song at 2026 World Soundtrack Awards

"Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters is not done collecting hardware. The HUNTR/X track, performed by EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and REI AMI, won Best Original Song at the 2026 World Soundtrack Awards on October 10 during Film Fest Gent in Belgium. The win caps a victory lap that already included a Grammy, a Golden Globe, and an Oscar earlier this year.

The song was written by Kim Eun-jae, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo, and Teddy Park. It topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks and became the first K-pop song to reach number one in the U.K. in 13 years. At this point, "Golden" is one of the most decorated film songs in recent memory, and the World Soundtrack Awards win only adds to that record.

The competition was serious. The nominated songs included Charli xcx and John Cale's "House" from Wuthering Heights, Cynthia Erivo's "No Place Like Home" from Wicked: For Good, and Nick Cave's "Train Dreams." That "Golden" cleared that field says something about how deep the song has cut across markets and audiences globally.

Who Else Won at the 2026 World Soundtrack Awards?

British composer Daniel Pemberton took Film Composer of the Year for a stack of projects: Project Hail Mary, The Drama, The Bad Guys 2, and Masters of the Universe. He beat out a category that included Alexandre Desplat, Jonny Greenwood, Hildur Gudnadottir, and Max Richter. That is not a category you win on a fluke.

Jeff Russo won Television Composer of the Year for Alien: Earth, Cape Fear, and Citadel Season 2. Finneas O'Connell was nominated for Beef Season 2, which is worth noting given how closely that score has been watched since the first season.

Hannah Peel took Discovery of the Year for Midwinter Break. The Public Choice Award went to Kevin Smithers for Soy Frankelda. Game Music went to Nicolas Garcia for Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss. Trevor Jones received the Lifetime Achievement Award, with the ceremony concert featuring music from Hildur Gudnadottir performed by Brussels Philharmonic.

What the "Golden" Sweep Means for K-Pop's Place in Global Film Culture

The broader story here is not just one song winning one more award. "Golden" has demonstrated that K-pop acts can compete at the highest levels of Western prestige music, the kind that lives in film scores and awards circuits traditionally dominated by European and American composers.

Teddy Park's production work has been central to that push. His fingerprints are on some of the biggest K-pop records of the past decade, and his presence on a song that wins at Ghent's film music ceremony signals a genuine shift in how global film music is being composed and credited. The songwriting team behind "Golden" spans Seoul and Los Angeles, which is exactly the kind of cross-cultural creative infrastructure that tends to define an era.

For composers, producers, and artists working at the intersection of visual media and music, this cycle is worth paying attention to. The World Soundtrack Awards exist specifically to recognize the craft behind film and television scores, and a K-pop aligned song winning Best Original Song there carries weight beyond the trophy.

If you are an independent composer or producer working on sync placements and want to stay connected to how this space is moving, check out what we have at [/pass-the-aux](/pass-the-aux) for the conversations happening around music and visual media. And if you are creating work in this lane, [submit it here](/submit) so we can keep an eye on it.

The KPop Demon Hunters awards run is likely finished, but the precedent it set is not. Watch how quickly the next wave of K-pop adjacent film and TV projects gets greenlit with similar creative teams.