Audrey Nuna had just finished eating—or rather, not finished eating—when the year she’d planned detonated and turned into something else entirely. Hunger aside, 2025 arrived with a neat, logical arc: release Trench, hit the road, play the first American headlining tour, then take it overseas. Reasonable. Earned. Then a “little movie,” as she puts it, showed up and casually rerouted everything.
“Oh yeah. This has been the craziest year of my life,” she said, still sounding slightly amused by the absurdity of it all. “I’m just like, who wrote this script? This is insane.”
The script twist was KPop Demon Hunters, an animated juggernaut that turned Nuna into one third of HUNTR/X—part pop idol, part global phenomenon—right as Trench was finding its footing in the real world. The timing bordered on surreal. “The song had gone number one on the Global 200 the last day of my Trench international tour,” she said. “Everything has felt really surprising, but at the same time very weirdly predestined.”
Despite the chaos, Nuna hasn’t treated Trench like a chapter that’s already closed. “I think I’ll be promoting Trench forever, honestly,” she said. “At any album that I make, I would love to continue sharing it and getting people to hear it.” Still, the color palette has shifted. “This experience has definitely given my life a very new color palette… I’m very re-energized. Working on the next album, really inspired.”
That re-energizing came from a project she entered with almost suspiciously pure intentions. KPop Demon Hunters wasn’t a calculated career move—it was something closer to instinct. “I like animation. I love what this movie stands for. I love that it’s a Korean cast. I love that it’s a Korean director,” she said. “I was super down to be a part of it. That was really it.”
The gig itself arrived through a chain of half-forgotten connections and long-dormant relationships. “There were people who recommended me… Ejae, who I’ve known since I was 15, and Danny Chung, who’s known me since I was 20,” Nuna said. “Just these really weird peripheral connections that were rumbling under the surface.”
What she didn’t anticipate was the scale. “I thought it was going to do well,” she admitted. “But to think, like, families in India and grandmas in Czechoslovakia are going to know this film? That’s different than I expected.”
The difference, she thinks, lives in the hybrid nature of the project itself. “It’s obviously K-pop, but at its core it’s very Korean-American, Korean-Canadian,” she said. “When everybody can see themselves in it, that’s when you win.”
That sense of universality changed her relationship to the music. Unlike her solo work—where she writes, produces, directs, tweaks, and polishes—these songs asked for something simpler. “Your only job was to deliver the character,” she said. “There’s something really nostalgic about that… it almost took the ego out of everything for me.”
It also reframed what recording even means. “Recording is an art in itself,” Nuna said. “In the age of hyper-nonchalance and aesthetic-based music, you forget that your job is to bring humanness to songs.”
Humanness has become her current obsession, especially as tools grow more powerful and perfection becomes default. “We’re all thirsting for some sense of ‘I’m a human, you’re a human,’” she said. “Whether we realize it or not.”
That craving is steering the next record. Nuna talks about restraint with a surprising reverence, citing industrial designer Dieter Rams and the idea that less really can be more. “I want to hear my actual voice more,” she said. “I want to be off-tempo for a second. Do a song without a click. Things that feel very right but wrong.”
It’s a sharp pivot from the sleek glaze she associates with Trench, a record she still loves but sees clearly now. “There was this glaze over everything that made it feel a bit robotic,” she said. “That was part of the concept, but now I almost want to crack the songs.”
That tension—between polish and fracture, control and chaos—mirrors her career moment. Nuna is technically independent, sort of, maybe, depending on the day. “A lot of things are changing in my life,” she said carefully. What matters more is the rare position she finds herself in. “To even be able to ask, ‘What is your ideal situation?’—that’s such a blessing.”
It’s also how she ended up in a girl group she never planned on joining. “I’m the least girl-groupy person I’ve ever met,” she laughed. “And somehow I find myself in this all-time charting girl group.”
Simulation theory comes up more than once, partly as a joke, partly not. “Everything’s lining up in a weird way,” she said. “I do believe in simulation in some way. Life is a mystery.”
For now, Nuna seems content living inside the mystery—solo artist, animated pop star, human voice slightly off the grid. Somewhere between Trench and whatever comes next, she’s learning that imperfection isn’t something to fix. It’s the whole point.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the track below.
