On a December evening in Los Angeles, a swarm of eager young pop fans forms a queue outside the Hollywood Palladium that streams down Sunset Boulevard. Variously dressed in Y2K-inspired pastels and LED-animated cat ears, they are here to see the ascendant global girl group Katseye during their sold-out inaugural concert tour.
An hour before showtime, VIP fans file into the theater for an informal press conference, where Katseye’s six members—Daniela Avanzini, 21; Lara Raj, 20; Megan Skiendiel, 20; Manon Bannerman, 23; Yoonchae Jeung, 18; and Sophia Laforteza, 23—field questions and accept gifts, including a bedazzled journal and a wedding ring. The most die-hard “Eyekons,” as Katseye fans are known, range in age from children yoked to their parents to millennials who grew up listening to the Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child. (“They’re like the second coming of the Pussycat Dolls,” a 29-year-old Los Angeles local named Jaz tells me.)
Girl groups have always had passionate followers, but the Eyekons have been carefully cultivated. A joint creation of American label Geffen Records and Hybe—the Korean entertainment powerhouse most famous for launching BTS—Katseye was forged from a 12-week boot camp in Los Angeles, the whole thing captured for a 2023 reality-competition series called The Debut: Dream Academy on YouTube. Here, 20 girls aged 15 to 21 submitted to rigorous vocal training and dance lessons in heels, while very-online fans watched and voted—the strength of their feedback (harvested through Weverse, Hybe’s online fan platform) balanced against that of a panel of industry judges. Netflix’s ensuing Popstar Academy: Katseye tracked the way the fans and record professionals aligned and diverged through rounds of contender eliminations, with some Katseye hopefuls getting by on fan popularity alone. Eventually, only six girls remained from the winnowing process, and Katseye was born.
When I speak to Katseye over Zoom a few days after the Palladium show, they’re in Mexico City, the final stop of their Beautiful Chaos tour, which hit 14 North American cities in about a month. All are, by now, a little worse for wear. Avanzini had hoped to see Bad Bunny play the Estadio GNP Seguros that night, but she was battling a virus that had already knocked out Skiendiel, who was on bed rest.
Of course, the toll of pop stardom hasn’t been only physical; for every adoring Eyekon there’s a vicious, faceless critic ranking the girls by their talent or their looks. (When, in February, Hybe and Geffen Records announced that Bannerman would be taking a “temporary hiatus” from the group to “focus on her health and wellbeing,” fans alternately blamed burnout and internet trolls.) “We really do our best to be supportive of one another,” Laforteza says. “If any of us are going through anything, we will lock all six of us in a bathroom until we feel fine.” Between the crush of daily rehearsals, public appearances, and performances, they’ve dutifully attended therapy together too.
“We have been with each other every single day for the past two years,” adds Avanzini. “We’re learning about our different cultures and the way we work, but what we love brings us together—like the fact that we all love singing, dancing, and just performing.”
Their ethnic and cultural diversity is no small thing: Avanzini was raised by Cuban and Venezuelan parents in Atlanta; Raj, the daughter of Tamil immigrants, grew up in New York City; Skiendiel is Chinese Singaporean American by way of Honolulu; Jeung hails from Seoul; Bannerman is Swiss Ghanaian; and Laforteza grew up in Manila. Where many K-pop groups prioritize a certain conformity, Katseye projects a vision of pop globalism.
That’s a point of pride for its members. Unlike intraditional K-pop, Katseye sings predominantly in English, but for “Gabriela”—the second single from their 2025 EP, Beautiful Chaos—Avanzini contributed a verse in Spanish. (The song earned the group one of their two Grammy nominations this year, for best pop duo/group performance and best new artist.) The other girls are keen to do versions of the same. “Seeing Dani rep her culture, then seeing how much it blew up, was a good sign that the global factor works in our music,” says Raj. “We all want to put our cultures into our songs. Bollywood was used so much in the 2000s by Timbaland and Pharrell, Britney Spears, even Gaga. So there’s a lot of room to show our sauce.”
Other singles have floated a weirder, more experimental sound—like last year’s polarizing “Gnarly,” a glitchy work of hyperpop bedlam cowritten by the Chinese avant-gardist Alice Longyu Gao. Jeung, for one, found the song’s raunchy goofiness (one lyric: “Hottie, hottie, like a bag of Takis / I’m the shit, I’m the shit”) liberating. In their training under Hybe, “we had to be really perfect and cookie-cutter,” she says. “But in Katseye, I learned to be more raw. So when we did ‘Gnarly,’ we got to show ourselves more…not being scared of not being perfect.”
“People have expectations of what a girl group should sound like,” Raj observes. “I don’t want us to have music that makes people go, ‘Oh, cute.’ ”
Acceptance is a recurring theme. On “Mean Girls,” also from Beautiful Chaos, they sing sweet assurances to transgender and gender-nonconforming youth (“God bless the T-girls and all the in-between girls”), calling to mind the self-esteem pop of the Y2K era—take TLC’s “Unpretty” or Britney Spears’s anthemic “Lucky” as examples. Given that out, queer K-pop stars are still thin on the ground, that messaging felt important. “[We] have a huge responsibility because Katseye is not just a Western group—it reaches so many countries that do not have any queer representation,” says Raj. Last March she herself came out to fans as bisexual (via Weverse); Skiendiel did so too a few months later.
“Seeing the love and safety our fans create made it feel right,” Skiendiel says. “I wanted to live honestly and let people feel less alone by doing the same.” (In LA, I spoke to a 23-year-old fan named Francesca who lauded exactly this kind of candor: “They’re not as restricted as groups in the K-pop field,” she said. “You see them go out more. They can be more relatable.”)
Shrewd fashion collaborations have also figured into the Katseye project. For one, a fall 2025 denim campaign for Gap soundtracked by “Milkshake,” Kelis’s coquettish, R&B-dance hit from 2003, has racked up some 63 million views on YouTube. “We’re constantly using fashion as a language to push boundaries,” says Humberto Leon, Katseye’s creative director, who cut his teeth at Gap in the 1990s before cofounding Opening Ceremony and later leading design at Kenzo with Carol Lim. “We pull vintage Nicolas Ghesquière for Balenciaga pieces, but they also wear Conner Ives. Gigi Goode was a contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race who ended up designing these amazing outfits for their first festival, Wango Tango.” More recently, stylist Katie Qian fitted the girls with custom Adidas boots for the Beautiful Chaos tour, and at the Grammys, every member wore a slightly different dress of white mesh, lace, and leather by Ludovic de Saint Sernin.
Katseye is now revving up for a set at Coachella, the scale of which has made them think about striking out into new genres. “With all these upcoming stages we have, it would be so fun to have hype songs that go crazy live…techno, EDM, rock, Afrobeats,” says Bannerman, prompting a chorus of enthusiastic yeahs. It’s a reminder of this group’s somewhat unplaceable, and therefore endlessly reinventable, identity.
“Just being ourselves, with our skin tones shining through, our individuality, and our style,” Raj muses, “and being best friends through it all?” It’s the Katseye selling point: a fantasy of global girlhood turned real.
In this story: hair, Erol Karadağ; makeup, Holly Silius.
Produced by Hyperion.