Cover The nominees for the 2026 Grammy Awards include Ejae (Kim Eun-jae) for her work on ‘Kpop Demon Hunters’, where she co-wrote the monster hit ‘Golden’ and provided the singing voice for Huntr/X lead Rumi (Photo: Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
The nominees for the 2026 Grammy Awards include Ejae (Kim Eun-jae) for her work on ‘Kpop Demon Hunters’, where she co-wrote the monster hit ‘Golden’ and provided the singing voice for Huntr/X lead Rumi (Photo: Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)
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From Rosé and Bruno Mars’s chart-topping ‘Apt.’ to K-pop anthem ‘Golden’ and global girl group Katseye, artists of Asian heritage are front and centre in the 2026 Grammy Awards’ biggest categories
Asian artists aren’t just knocking on the door of “music’s biggest night” this year—they’re comfortably in the living room, feet up on the Grammys’ very plush sofa. The 2026 nominations put Asian and Asian-diaspora talent right in the thick of the so-called “Big Four”: Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist. From K-pop royalty and Filipino representation to a Tamil-Indian pop star and a West Asian hitmaker, the global pop machine suddenly looks a lot more like, well, the globe.
That visibility doesn’t come out of nowhere. This year alone, KPop Demon Hunters became a full-blown cultural event, with its soundtrack smashing streaming records and sending multiple songs into the Billboard charts, while girl group Katseye parlayed reality-show origins into festival slots, brand campaigns and a top-five EP. Add Rosé’s chart-topping duet Apt. with Bruno Mars and you get a snapshot of how Korean, Filipino, Indian and broader Asian stories are now baked into mainstream pop narratives, rather than treated as curiosities at the edges.
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This year’s Grammys don’t solve representation overnight, but the major-category nominations tell an important story: Asian artists are no longer just dominating their “own” regions or niche categories. They’re competing, credibly and loudly, for the biggest prizes of the night.
Nominated for Record of the Year and Song of the Year: Rosé & Bruno Mars’s ‘Apt.’
In the Grammys’ Record of the Year race, one track carries a distinctly Asian heartbeat: Apt. by Rosé and Bruno Mars, with producer-songwriter credits for Rogét Chahayed alongside Cirkut, Omer Fedi and Mars himself. The bubbly pop single—sparked, delightfully, by a Korean drinking game—has become one of the year’s defining hits and gives Rosé her biggest solo Grammys moment yet.
Rosé, best known as one-quarter of Blackpink, is a New Zealand-born, Australia-raised South Korean artist whose debut solo album Rosie has turned her into a front-line global pop star rather than just an idol. Her partner on Apt. is Bruno Mars, the consummate Grammys favourite whose mother was a Filipina from Manila—making him one of the most visible Filipino-heritage names in mainstream Western pop.
Above Earlier this year, Rosé accepted another Song of the Year Award for ‘Apt.’ with Bruno Mars, from the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. The songwriters behind ‘Apt.’ all share Asian heritage: Rosé, Bruno Mars and Rogét Chahayed (Photo: Manny Carabel/Getty Images for MTV)
Earlier this year, Rosé accepted another Song of the Year Award for ‘Apt.’ with Bruno Mars, from the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. The songwriters behind ‘Apt.’ all share Asian heritage: Rosé, Bruno Mars and Rogét Chahayed (Photo: Manny Carabel/Getty Images for MTV)
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Apt. is doubly significant because it also appears in Song of the Year, where the award goes to the songwriters. Here, Rosé (credited under her Korean name Park Chae-young), Bruno Mars and Rogét Chahayed all earn nods. Chahayed, an in-demand Los Angeles producer whose father emigrated from Syria, brings West Asian heritage into the frame; he’s long been described as one of hip-hop and pop’s most reliable “hit machines”, with credits ranging from Travis Scott’s Sicko Mode to Doja Cat and Jack Harlow. Taken together, Apt. turns Record and Song of the Year into a small case study in Asian and Asian-diaspora collaboration: K-pop meets Filipino lineage meets West Asia, delivered through pure, polished chart pop.
Nominated for Song of the Year: ‘Golden’ from ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
The other big Asian flag planted in Song of the Year is Golden from the Netflix animated film KPop Demon Hunters, performed in-universe by fictional girl group Huntr/X but voiced in real life by Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami.
On paper, it’s a soundtrack cut. In reality, it’s a world-conquering pop anthem. Golden topped the Billboard Global 200 and Global Excl US charts, held the No 1 spot for a total of 14 non-consecutive weeks and helped propel KPop Demon Hunters to record-shattering viewership. The Grammy nod in Song of the Year goes directly to its writers Ejae (Kim Eun-jae) and Mark Sonnenblick, with Ejae also serving as the singing voice of Rumi, the film’s protagonist.
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Ejae herself is a fascinating new face for global audiences: a Seoul-born, South Korean American singer, songwriter and producer, previously known in K-pop circles for writing for acts like Red Velvet, Aespa and Twice before her breakout with KPop Demon Hunters. She’s been vocal about wanting to share Korean culture through pop and has described the success of Golden as both surreal and deeply tied to her identity.
Around her, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami complete a distinctly Korean American constellation. Audrey Nuna—born Audrey Chu in New Jersey—is an experimental R&B and hip-hop artist who also voices the character Mira in the film. Rei Ami (born Sarah Yeeun Lee in Seoul, later raised in the US) brings her dark alt-pop sensibility to Zoey’s singing voice and has been widely described as a Korean American singer-rapper.
Golden becoming the global song of the 2025 summer is particularly satisfying: it’s Korean creators shaping Korean stories for a worldwide audience—and now being recognised at the very top tier of Anglo American music awards.
Nominated for Best New Artist: Katseye
Above Nominated for Best New Artists are Sofia Laforteza, Lara Raj, Manon Bannerman, Daniela Avanzini and Megan Skiendiel of Katseye—a lineup that is a demographic flex in itself (Photo: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
Nominated for Best New Artists are Sofia Laforteza, Lara Raj, Manon Bannerman, Daniela Avanzini and Megan Skiendiel of Katseye—a lineup that is a demographic flex in itself (Photo: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
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In Best New Artist, the Asian spotlight falls on Katseye, the six-member “global girl group” formed by Hybe and Geffen through the reality competition The Debut: Dream Academy and later chronicled in the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: Katseye.
The group’s line-up is a demographic flex in itself: Sophia Laforteza, the group’s leader, is a Filipino and American singer who grew up in Manila and became Hybe’s first Filipina artist. Yoonchae Jeung is a Seoul-born Korean vocalist and former K-pop trainee. Lara Raj is widely described as an Indian American pop artist of Tamil heritage, who has been candid about her queerness and desire to represent South Asian fans in global pop. They’re joined by Manon, a Swiss Ghanaian member raised in Switzerland; Daniela who is Venezuelan Cuban American, and Megan who is Chinese Singaporean American, giving the group a truly multicultural footprint that mirrors their mission of celebrating differences.
Musically, Katseye sit in a sweet spot between Western pop and K-pop aesthetics—tight choreography, high-concept visuals and hook-packed songs like Gnarly and Gabriela, the latter also earning them a nod for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. Their Best New Artist nomination is historic not only for the group but for the fans who’ve watched Asian and “global” girl groups edge closer to Grammys recognition for more than a decade.
Global representation in the Grammys: an overdue acknowledgement
Zoom out, and a pattern emerges. Rosé, Bruno Mars, Ejae, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami, Rogét Chahayed and Katseye represent very different corners of Asia and the Asian diaspora—Korea, the Philippines, India, West Asia, mixed-heritage Americans—yet they’re all converging in the same top-tier categories that have traditionally favoured a very narrow idea of who gets to define pop.
The Grammys are famously slow to catch up with reality, so the 2026 nominations feel less like a sudden breakthrough and more like an overdue acknowledgement of what listeners in Asia (and the Asian diaspora) have known for years: the future of global pop is polyglot, transnational and proudly hybrid. This year, music’s biggest night finally looks a little more like the audience that’s been powering those streams all along.
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Kristine Fonacier is a widely published journalist and author, covering lifestyle, business, politics and travel, having been the editor in chief at the Philippine editions of Esquire and Entrepreneur, and the founding editor of Grid magazine. At Tatler, she was previously the regional editor for T-Labs, Power & Purpose and Asia’s Most Influential.
