The 35th Seoul Music Awards: ATEEZ takes the Grand Prize

In three lines.

• The 35th Seoul Music Awards were held on June 20 at Inspire Arena in Incheon.
• ATEEZ took both the Grand Prize and a Main Award.
• BOYNEXTDOOR and Lee Chan-won each won four awards, while ZEROBASEONE and LE SSERAFIM each won three.

The Grand Prize goes to ATEEZ

The Seoul Music Awards reached its 35th edition. It's a ceremony that gathers a year of popular music in one place to take stock, and this year it was held at Inspire Arena in Incheon. On the night of June 20, name after name was called out on that stage.

The name at the very top was ATEEZ. They took home both the Grand Prize and a Main Award. If a Main Award (Bonsang) goes out broadly to the stages that defined the year, the Grand Prize (Daesang) is the one spot handed to a single team among them. Receiving both side by side says pretty clearly where this ceremony placed the year's weight.

A wider spread of winners

The spread of winners was wide. BOYNEXTDOOR heard their name in four categories: Best Album, World Best Artist, the R&B/Hip-hop Award, and a Main Award. For a team that hasn't been around long, taking an album award and a world-stage award together is worth noticing. Lee Chan-won was a four-time winner too, with Best Artist, the Popularity Award, the Trot Award, and a Main Award. An idol group and a trot singer holding the same number of trophies means this year's stage didn't narrow into a single lane.

ZEROBASEONE and LE SSERAFIM each took three. In a setting where all eyes tend to land on the one Grand Prize team, hearing this many names called out evenly makes the year's landscape come through more clearly. Some awards were given by album, some by public vote, and some by genre. In other words, there wasn't just one yardstick for measuring a year of music.

The same night, different names

That's the last of the numbers. Now, the music. What lasts longer than a trophy count is a single moment on stage. Names with textures as different as trot, hip-hop, and idol pop were called side by side on the same night. That picture sounded like a greeting from this early-summer music scene. Wherever they started out, they're all people who laid one song onto someone's day. At the edge of summer, it was a night that arrived through each of their own music.

A stage from the act that took the grand prize — here's a song.