By Rosie Lu
From their world-shaking debut in the summer of 2024, Katseye were the it-girls of the global music industry. Starstruck onlookers and listeners alike dubbed them a group of all-rounders, exemplary in every field—powerful and dynamic vocals, detailed yet intense performances, and relatable personas that seemed closer to their audience than ever seen in girl groups. That’s what the collaboration between K-pop giant HYBE and influential American record label Geffen meant to create: the discipline of K-pop and the freedom of Western pop fused by cultural diversity representative of the real world.
The competition show preceding the group’s formation, Dream Academy, set Katseye up for success, yes, but I could argue just as easily that it was the root of the rifts between the fandom and between even the members themselves. Viewers fell in love with how real and honest the teenage girls were—fully embracing their culture, creating beautiful bonds of friendship, all striving towards an admirable goal. But the show’s producers admitted it themselves: Dream Academy had to be orchestrated to draw in unprecedented worldwide interest, and they achieved that by pitting members against each other as representatives of their home country. The whole idea of meritocracy, that those who worked the hardest could get to the top, was undermined by a fan voting system where people simply voted for their national representative.
Manon was one of those members who the show depicted as possessing inherent star quality, but not putting in the extra effort—she missed a couple of practices and seemed to lack overall dedication, so people began to speculate she made the final cut due to favoritism or her natural charisma. The last episode of Dream Academy tried to end on a positive note, but everyone saw how the rejected contestants ignored Manon’s attempts to comfort them.
Regardless, their first debut with SIS (Soft is Strong) was largely successful, with the soft aesthetics of “Touch” and “Debut” resonating especially with the K-pop side of the fanbase. But that was also when the Manon debacle began—hiding her behind fellow members in six-person formations that were really meant to showcase five. Although this era began to show the cracks, it overall set Katseye on a positive trajectory, at least in the public eye.
Then came Beautiful Chaos—exactly what it sounds like, especially the highly experimental title track “Gnarly” that seemed more like a trending TikTok audio than a global girl group banger. Fans claimed it was Katseye’s rebellion against the industry, but in reality, it was an attempt by the management to build a brand image and personality for the sake of appealing to pop culture audiences. Maybe the ugly beauty of “Gnarly” worked out in the few months following its release, receiving largely enthusiastic feedback across social media platforms for embracing the new and untested, but it was a temporary strategy that left Katseye artistically limited in their next choices.
Of course, they chose to lean further into that “shock the world with something so bad it’s good” type of style, with the ultimately embarrassing “Internet Girl” release. Katseye had an audience of millions around the world who looked up to them as idols, yet their management chose to appeal to the chronically online—come on, a seemingly endless repetition of “eat zucchini” combined with an AI child voice for special effects?
And finally, Katseye leaves us today with “Pinky Up,” which, to be fair, finally has a vocal chorus with some substance compared to the previous era, but its message of reinterpreting sophistication as empowerment doesn’t get its word across. The agencies seem set on erasing Manon from the group entirely, as her “hiatus” excludes her from the latest comeback, and the bright mood of this new single seems just like a cover for what’s really going on underneath.
Katseye is exceptionally talented, each with a story to bring, and they could have more than succeeded if HYBE and Geffen had taken a back seat and let that unique individualism speak for itself. But instead, the companies chose to redesign the members and sell them to us as a marketable package, trying to make them the rebels through a watered-down concept that smelled suspiciously strongly of AI. All we want for Katseye is for each girl to have a voice, an image that is entirely their own, and only time will tell if their agency is willing to grant that to the members they owe it to.