Songfacts®:

• "Free" is a duet from the Netflix animated film KPop Demon Hunters performed by the characters Rumi and Jinu. The movie centers on Huntr/x, a virtuous K-pop girl group fronted by Rumi, who juggle global fame with a hidden life as demon hunters protecting their fans from lurking supernatural threats. Their most formidable enemies are The Saja Boys, a rival K-pop boy band led by Jinu, who beneath the slick choreography and dazzling lights, are demons in disguise - not in the music industry metaphorical sense, but actual supernatural creatures.
• "Free" slows things down for a tender, private moment - one in which two seemingly doomed characters drop the masks and sing about what it would mean to actually be free: of expectations, of darkness, and most of all, of the secrets eating them alive.
• "Free" is the emotional core of KPop Demon Hunters, and it's also the film's only traditional musical number. It doesn't happen on stage with pyro and backup dancers. It happens because it has to - because their feelings have grown too big to contain. Jinu and Rumi, despite standing on opposite sides of the supernatural fence, find kinship in shared pain, secrecy, and the struggle to control the demons inside, literal and figurative.
• K-Pop Star contestant Andrew Choi voices Jinu, while singer-songwriter EJAE gives Rumi her voice.
• BTS co-writers Stephen Kirk and Jenna Andrews ("Butter," "Permission To Dance") wrote "Free" with musical theater composer and lyricist Mark Sonnenblick.
• Andrews and Kirk also produced the track alongside Ian Eisendrath (Dear Evan Hansen, Come From Away). Eisendrath described the song to Tudum as "two people singing to each other and sharing things they've probably never shared with another human in the world."
• The song's central theme is a yearning for release - freedom not just from external threats, but from the burdens of their hidden selves. As Eisendrath explained, "There are great walls between them, and the whole thing is, 'What would it be like if we could be together and free?'"
  
  They even dream of a (slightly misguided) plan to destroy the demon parts within them. Because for all their fantastical context, "Free" is about something deeply human: the desire to be fully known and fully accepted.