KATSEYE

Built in public, from an audition line

KATSEYE exist because Hybe and Geffen Records decided to run the Korean trainee system in English and film it. Auditions were held across South Korea, the United States, Japan and the United Kingdom in 2022, drawing more than 120,000 applicants. Twenty trainees were whittled down on camera in the 2023 competition series Dream Academy, and the process was later packaged for Netflix as the docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE — which means a large part of the group's audience watched the members fail, argue and get cut before they ever heard a single.

The six who came through were Sophia Laforteza from the Philippines, who became the leader, Lara Raj and Megan Skiendiel from the United States, Daniela Avanzini, Manon Bannerman from Switzerland and Yoonchae Jeung from South Korea. They are based in Los Angeles rather than Seoul, and the group has always been positioned as a global pop act built with K-pop machinery rather than a K-pop group as such.

The first single, "Debut", arrived in June 2024, followed by "Touch", which did the early heavy lifting on social platforms. The first EP, SIS (Soft Is Strong), came in August 2024 and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 119 — a modest number that gave little sign of what the next two years would do.

Three EPs, and a jump in scale

The second EP, Beautiful Chaos, was released on 27 June 2025 through Hybe x Geffen and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 4. It was carried by "Gnarly", a deliberately abrasive single that became the group's first entry on the Hot 100, and by "Gabriela", which reached the top 40 and turned into the record most people can name.

The first headline tour followed. Announced on 8 July 2025 and expanded from 13 dates to 16 after pre-sale demand, the Beautiful Chaos Tour ran from 15 November to 16 December 2025 across the United States, Canada and Mexico. It picked up three iHeartRadio Music Award nominations in 2026 and won one, for tour photography. A new song, "Internet Girl", was played on that tour before its release on 2 January 2026.

The third EP, Wild, came on 14 August 2026 — five tracks and roughly fourteen minutes of music, with a bonus track pushing it past seventeen. It was preceded by "Pinky Up" on 9 April 2026 and "Animal" on 24 July, with "Hootie Frutti" arriving alongside the record. Wild opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 170,000 album-equivalent units, the group's first chart-topping debut, and reached No. 2 in the United Kingdom and France, No. 1 in the Netherlands and both Belgian regions, and the top ten in a dozen further markets. Its credits run from Hybe founder Bang Si-hyuk to Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin.

Where the critics and the charts part company

Commercial momentum has not bought critical consensus. Wild holds a Metacritic score of 48 from mixed reviews, the weakest reception of the group's three EPs. Pitchfork scored it 4.5 out of 10 and wrote that the record "tries to crank up the moxie and chaos, but it can only paper over an inner emptiness". Paste graded it D+ and argued the songs sit as far as possible from anything raw or authentic. The recurring complaint is incoherence — a short release pulling in several directions at once rather than settling on one.

The live reviews have run the other way. Coverage of the Beautiful Chaos Tour in late 2025 singled out choreography delivered alongside audible live vocals, and the Toronto Star gave the show three and a half stars out of four. A San Francisco date suffered audio faults and unexplained pauses, and even that was written up favourably on the strength of how the group handled it. The gap between how the records read on paper and how the four of them work a stage is now the central fact about KATSEYE.

A Grammy night without a trophy

In November 2025 KATSEYE were nominated in two categories at the 68th Grammy Awards: Best New Artist, and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance for "Gabriela". They performed at the ceremony on 1 February 2026, taking part in the Best New Artist segment with a reworked "Gnarly". Olivia Dean took the award.

The festival year that followed put them in front of much larger, less committed crowds: Lollapalooza Argentina and Chile in March 2026, then Coachella in April, where the group used the set to announce the Wild EP.

Four out of six

The group that is touring is not the group on the record sleeve. Manon Bannerman stepped back in February 2026 to focus on her health and wellbeing, and missed the Coachella performance; no return date has been given. Sophia Laforteza, the leader, announced a temporary hiatus in early August 2026 to deal with her mental health, with the situation to be reassessed in September. On 31 August the label confirmed she would miss the entire UK and European leg of the tour while she continued treatment. No timetable has been set for either member's return.

Speaking on the TODAY plaza on 14 August 2026, the day Wild was released, Lara Raj said of the two absent members: "We stand by Sophia and Manon through and through. We ride for them." Megan Skiendiel used the same conversation to argue that scheduled rest is part of the job rather than a failure of it, and that audiences assume performers have everything sorted out when they do not. The Wild material leans on the same subject matter, which has given the current shows an unusually direct line between what is sung and what the audience already knows.

The Wildworld Tour, mid-flight

The tour was announced on 13 May 2026, with a Weverse pre-sale on 20 May and general sale the following day, produced by Live Nation. It runs to 31 dates. The European leg opened at Dublin's 3Arena on 1 September and closed at Copenhagen's Royal Arena on 17 September, taking in The O2 in London on 3 and 4 September — a second night added after the first sold out — Co-op Live in Manchester on 6 September, the Accor Arena in Paris, the Ziggo Dome in Amsterdam, the Lanxess Arena in Cologne and the AFAS Dome in Antwerp.

The North American leg begins at the Kaseya Center in Miami on 13 October and runs through UBS Arena in Elmont on 24 October and Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on 21 November before finishing in Mexico City at the end of the month. Avanzini, Raj, Skiendiel and Jeung are carrying it between them, with ten dancers and no support act on the bill.

Dublin's opening night drew accusations of miming on social media. Reviewers at The O2 two nights later reported the opposite: microphones live throughout, with ad-libs audible over the backing. That argument, rather than anything on the setlist, is the one following the tour from city to city.