She Was Told Her Voice Wasn't Good Enough. Now EJAE Has a Grammy — and a Wedding Date.
After "Golden" from Netflix's KPop Demon Hunters became the first K-pop song to win a Grammy, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter announced her November 7 wedding to producer Sam Kim - capping the most extraordinary week of her career.
For a decade, EJAE trained at SM Entertainment with one goal: to debut as a K-pop idol. She never did. The label dropped her in 2015, and the rejection, she has said, cut deep. A little over ten years later, on the night of February 1, she stood inside Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles holding the Grammy for Best Song Written for Visual Media - the first K-pop artist to ever win one.
Days after that win, news broke that EJAE and her longtime partner, music producer Sam Kim, will marry on November 7 in Los Angeles. The week of February 6 brought the double announcement into full view: a historic professional milestone and a long-anticipated personal one, arriving almost simultaneously.
K-Pop's First Grammy Win
"Golden," the lead single from Netflix's animated film KPop Demon Hunters, won Best Song Written for Visual Media at the 68th Grammy Awards on February 1 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The award went to the full songwriting team: EJAE, Park Hong-jun (Teddy), Joong Gyu-kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon-seo, and Mark Sonnenblick. In the film, EJAE performs the track as part of HUNTR/X, the fictional girl group voiced by EJAE, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami.
"This is a crazy, historical moment," EJAE told Good Morning America on the red carpet. In an Instagram post that night, she went further - the win meant everything to her "as a musician, and even more as an Asian-American woman," a reminder, she wrote, "to never give up, to not be afraid to take risks, and to stay resilient."
The Grammy wasn't the first major award for "Golden." It had already won Best Original Song at the 2026 Golden Globes in January, where EJAE delivered a tearful speech that circulated widely: "When I was a little girl, I worked tirelessly for 10 years to fill one dream, to become a K-pop idol, and I was rejected. So now I'm here as a singer and a songwriter." She closed by dedicating the win "to people who have their doors closed at them" and quoting the song itself: "It's never too late to shine like you were born to be."
The song is also nominated for Best Original Song at the upcoming Academy Awards in March. On the Billboard Hot 100, it spent eight consecutive weeks at No. 1 in 2025 - a record for any animated group, surpassing The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" from 1969.
A November Wedding in Los Angeles
EJAE and Sam Kim got engaged in late 2023, though she waited until January 2026 to share the moment publicly - posting photos of Kim on one knee, alongside a cake reading "Happy Engajimint Sam + EJAY." They plan to marry on November 7 at a Los Angeles golf course operated by EJAE's mother, Shin Hye-jin, Vice Chair of Seyoung Enterprise. Sam Kim, like EJAE, is Korean-American.
The two met at a songwriting session in 2017 and spent years as close creative collaborators before their relationship became romantic. "He was basically my songwriting buddy," EJAE told Vulture in October 2025. "We truly grew up together." Her debut solo single "In Another World," released in October 2025, was written about a difficult stretch in their relationship - as has been true throughout her career, the personal and the professional were inseparable.
Awards season has left little room for wedding planning. "I still haven't chosen a wedding dress," she admitted recently. "I've been so focused on outfits for the Grammys and the Oscars."
The Long Road from SM Trainee to Grammy Stage
Born Kim Eun-jae in Seoul on December 6, 1991, EJAE is the granddaughter of Shin Young-kyun, one of South Korea's most prolific film actors, who appeared in 294 films and donated vast personal assets toward Korean cinema development. She moved to New Jersey as an infant, and at 11 began training at SM Entertainment, traveling between the US and South Korea throughout her adolescence.
After her 2015 departure from SM, she enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. A return to an SM songwriting camp in 2017 changed her trajectory entirely. Her first major credit - co-writing Red Velvet's "Psycho" (2019) - was certified Gold in the United States. Work with aespa, TWICE, and LE SSERAFIM followed, and EJAE built a formidable catalogue behind the scenes before most listeners knew her name.
Her involvement with KPop Demon Hunters began in 2020. Director Maggie Kang has credited EJAE's early demos as one of the reasons the film was greenlit. When it came time to cast the singing voice for Rumi - the film's half-demon protagonist - the directors didn't need to look far. (Actress Arden Cho provides Rumi's speaking voice.) The film went on to become Netflix's most-watched animated feature of all time.
With a Grammy on her shelf, an Oscar nomination still ahead, and a wedding in November, the woman once told her voice wasn't good enough is, by any measure, the defining K-pop story of 2026.
