Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA’s Dark Disney world
Written by Cameron Gorman
Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA have spent a long time building Dark Disney. Kicking off in a packed studio where friends brought friends, and everyone was trying to out-crazy each other. Ahead of their set at K-Music Festival 2026 in the UK, the duo join us to talk about their new music and being busier than ever.
Lil Cherry calls it a “resurgence season.” GOLDBUUDA calls it their “fourth cycle.” Whatever the label, Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA are now making music at an almost excessive pace. Between the new material as a duo, GOLDBUUDA’s work with Popsick, Lil Cherry’s new project OVARY, and a growing calendar of live performances, the two have never been more prolific. “We’re in the busiest season of our lives ever,” Lil Cherry says.
“Dark Disney” is how they describe the world they’ve created together. Looking back on their early seasons, the world of Dark Disney feels very different to what it is now. GOLDBUUDA reflects on a version of themselves that feels “much younger and much more pure.” He remembers recording Thousand Words in a single take. “CHEF TALK was such a miracle, magical album to me,” he says. “It’s very mystique. But at the same time, I get more scientific the more I do music.”
That period was marked by a kind of naivety. GOLDBUUDA remembers not knowing much about industry standards, as they focused on originality, with a goal “to create a new history in the K-hip hop scene.” Their studio became a revolving door: friends came through, those friends brought other friends, and suddenly there would be a crowd gathering around them. Producers competed with each other to make something crazier than whoever was next to them. Lil Cherry remembers the atmosphere as hot, chaotic, and intensely social.
That energy became part of their music. When Lil Cherry was writing in front of a room full of people, she says, she felt she had to do more than simply express herself. She was also doing everything she could to impress the people around her. “The tone of my voice might be a little bit higher, just because it’s that much fun and that much more hype and chaotic.”
Today, the circle is smaller. “I’m way more careful about who is in our inner circle,” Lil Cherry says. She has learned that the people surrounding a song can affect it just as much as the instruments and voices recorded into it. “We don’t need the wrong juju to be melted into a song.”
From the outside, that kind of selectiveness can look like distance. Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA joke that people have referred to her as the “ice princess” of the Korean hip hop scene, but they see it differently. The music industry, Lil Cherry says, can contain people who have nothing to lose, and sometimes protecting yourself means becoming more closed off. While their early years were about letting chaos control the energy, they’ve now focused their efforts on finding where that chaos belongs.
If there is one principle that has survived the four cycles of Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA’s creative relationship, it’s fun. “One of our slogans in music is always to try and bring the fun back.” Listening back to her earlier work, she still wants to capture the essence of “a lot of booty-shaking music.”
That sense of freedom still finds its way into their music, sometimes in ways that would probably frustrate a less patient producer. GOLDBUUDA has one particular complaint about Lil Cherry: she has a habit of not finishing her verses.
Sometimes she sends him three lines, sometimes seven. Sometimes, she says, “It might be, yeah, like 5.5 bars. Like it might be half a bar. You know? It might be just a word.”
Rather than forcing her to finish what she started, GOLDBUUDA treats the missing pieces as an artistic catalyst. He often takes the unfinished verse or an ad-lib and turns it into a chopped or glitched-out vocal, another opportunity for him to experiment. For Lil Cherry, this freedom exists precisely because she is working with GOLDBUUDA. She’s able to leave a verse or a take unresolved because she trusts him to understand where it might go.
Lil Cherry’s new project, OVARY, is a music and art collective that she describes as a punk outlet. “Taking everything I learned about the music industry,” she explains, “and trying to support up-and-coming artists, to make sure they don’t get scammed by the music industry,” she says. “That’s the whole goal behind OVARY.”
GOLDBUUDA, meanwhile, has been pushing further into the electronic side. His recent Level Up or Shut Up EP with Popsick mixes hip hop with hardstyle and harder electronic sounds, while his growing interest in ambient music and fashion has made him reconsider the boundaries of his own production. “Me as a producer, I can do anything,” he says.
Lil Cherry and GOLDBUUDA will be performing on September 28th at K-Music Festival 2026 in the UK. Lil Cherry promises “30 minutes of unexpected sound waves and frequencies and a whole lot of fun.” The set will move through different feelings and genres, with plenty of dancing and an unexpected collaboration with another act at the festival. Their music is something she thinks people are “supposed to hear in person.”
The fourth cycle, then, is about returning to what mattered to them from the beginning: the spontaneity, the energy, and the fun, while becoming more deliberate about who and what shapes their music.
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