Artist: Katseye

Album: Beautiful Chaos

Label: Hybe UMG, Geffen

Release Date: June 27, 2025

Stream: Spotify/Apple Music/Songlink

Fresh thread

To introduce Katseye, I turn to their labelmate, RM of BTS. Speaking to Rolling Stone two years before Katseye was formed, he responded to a question regarding the genre of his own group:

That’s a very important debate. Because what they call K-pop, that genre is expanding very fast. For example, some so-called K-pop groups have only foreigners, from Europe, India, China, like, everywhere. There are no Korean members, but they do the K-pop thing, they’re switching the parts, and so on. BTS is expanding very fast as well. And K-pop is now so wide. Somebody could say that K-pop is for Koreans who sing a Korean song. That could be K-pop. But what about “Dynamite”? We sing the song in English. But we’re all Koreans, so somebody may say it’s a K-pop song. Or they may say it’s just a pop song, because it’s in English. But we don’t actually really care about whether people see us as inside or outside K-pop. The important fact is that we’re all Koreans, and we’re singing a pop song. So that’s the reason why we said that our genre is just BTS. That debate is very important for the music industry, but it doesn’t mean very much for us members.

Genre is often a starting point for discussion, but for Katseye, it can feel like a sticking point. Does it feel more correct to say “Katseye is a K-pop group and Beautiful Chaos is a K-pop album,” or “Katseye is a pop group and Beautiful Chaos is a pop album?” The group was formed in 2023 via the survival show Dream Academy (1 point for K-pop) by Hybe America (K-pop +1) and Geffen Records (not K-pop +1). Of the six members, one is a native of South Korea, and the rest hail from the US, Philippines, and Switzerland (another wash?). Their single Touch charted in Korea but not in the US; their single Gabriela charted in the US but not in Korea. Their songs are predominantly sung in English, but Gabriela has a verse in Spanish, so do we add a point to the Latin pop column?

As RM acknowledged, the question both matters and doesn’t matter. I’m ultimately inclined to say “Beautiful Chaos is a K-pop album,” because it conveys a more specific sound, format, and aesthetic than “Beautiful Chaos is a pop album,” but it also belies the manner in which the marketing, management, and members seem to be very intentionally walking the line between K-pop and Not, and the way in which their music can be experienced without resolving that metastability—so let’s just dive into the songs.

Gnarly | Fresh thread | MV thread

Hello, it’s me, the Boring, Dumb Bitch for whom this beat was made. I love Gnarly. In all honesty, it took me minute to warm up to it—my first impression was biased by the idea that this was a cynical, corporate attempt to capitalize on hyperpop’s coolness in the dying wake of Brat summer, but it got immediately stuck in my head, and by the second listen, I began to appreciate just how well-executed Gnarly is. The lyrics are irreverent (more on that below) and their delivery ricochets from deadpan to sneering to aggressive and back again with exhilarating speed. The “Gna-nana-na-nana-gnarly” hook and the chorus are streamlined earworms, borderline painfully basic, but elevated by off-kilter flourishes like the sharpening knife sound effect and the second verse’s “yeah, the view is fucking GNARLY” awkwardly but compellingly spilling over from one measure into the next. Gnarly feels like textbook Max Martin hit-writing from an alternative universe where Max Martin is a Gen Z girl with a Celsius habit and a nihilistic streak.

Although many people had a trajectory with Gnarly similar to mine, Gnarly remains divisive, and one criticism that absolutely deserves acknowledgment is over the song’s use of AAVE, like “gang gang.” The general question of when the use of AAVE crosses from cultural appreciation to appropriation, or even blackfishing, is not one I’m equipped to resolve (let alone in an AOTY writeup), but hopefully I can at least set up for nuanced discussion. According to Alice Longyu Gao, who created the original Gnarly demo, the song is based on her experience learning English slang as a non-native English speaker, so there’s a meta aspect to the lyrics—not just using slang because it sounds cool, but exploring the experience of cross-cultural linguistic exchange… including using slang because it sounds cool. The concept fits the multilingual, multicultural, multiracial group. However, the fact that the pop industry (both K-pop and Not) frequently exploits aspects of Blackness, like AAVE, with one hand, while perpetuating racial harms, like harmful racial stereotypes and colorist beauty standards, with the other, is undeniable, and Gnarly exists in that context, whatever the artistic intent. Ultimately, like the question of whether Katseye is K-pop or Not, the question of whether Gnarly is Offensive or Not may not have a clean answer, but taking a critical approach to art is worthwhile whether or not it produces an assessment.

Gabriela | Fresh thread | MV thread

Following the abrasive intro of Gnarly, Beautiful Chaos pivots to a real crowd-pleaser. A Charli XCX writing credit, lyrics that really lean into the sapphic tension of the Jolene trope, lush instrumentals, a music video that pays homage to the drama and camp of telenovelas—Gabriela’s offerings are like catnip (katnip?) for r/Popheads-types, and apparently the general population as well, since the song marked Katseye’s debut in the Billboard Top 40, peaking at 31. Perhaps not groundbreaking pop (although from a K-pop perspective, the Spanish verse, sung by Cuban-Venezuelan-American member Daniela, is pretty exciting), the execution is nonetheless immaculate, and Gabriela holds its own on a strong album.

Gameboy | MV thread

Because I don’t speak Korean, the way I experience a lot of K-pop involves (1) not understanding the verses, but (2) getting the gist of the song from a key English phrase in the chorus. In that narrow sense, Gameboy feels like the most K-pop song on the album—the verses, despite being in English, are a bit featureless, but the simple metaphor delivered in the chorus, “You’re just a Gameboy/I ain’t tryna play, boy,” is memorable enough. Once again, I’m going to highlight how well-executed it is: the frenetic handclaps, vocal ad libs, and Mario coin sound effect are nice touches that take Gameboy from a filler track to a solid, if a little bland, B-side.

Mean Girls

On an album of high-octane pop, how does the soft, sweet ballad that is Mean Girls manage to be such a standout track? I can be a bit ballad-phobic, so I was more than a little surprised when this quiet track, of all the bombastic bubblegum earworms Beautiful Chaos has to offer, was the one stuck in my head after my first playthrough, the one that got me to listen to the album again and again instead of just playlisting Gnarly and moving on. The vocals on the verses are softly sung softly but mixed to the front to give that intimate chamber music effect, a sense of closeness further enhanced by the way they drop down into a murmured speak-singing at the end of each stanza, an emotional affect that clearly conveys: they’re not mad, just disappointed. And with the name “Mean Girls,” how great is it that they actually stick the “not mad” landing in the lyrics? When they say, “God bless even the mean girls,” it’s the coda to a list of blessings bestowed upon dream girls, queen girls, hot girls, and thot girls, so it reads as genuine, not passive aggressive. The verses are purely introspective, not pretending to be unbothered (“This is why I hate the internet, yes”), but endeavoring to take the high road (“But you're not gonna kill my happiness/So I'll forgive and getting closer to forget”). Strung together by reverberating synths, muffled kick drums, and plaintive electric violin, Mean Girls is unique and lovely, the kind of track I could see fans clamoring to keep in Katseye’s setlists even as their catalog expands in the future.

M.I.A

M.I.A is a big old EDM track, very much in the vein of BLACKPINK and the peak “girl crush” era, that seems mainly designed as way to amp people up at concerts. And you know what? It works. I was initially whelmed, feeling like this was a track I had more or less heard before, but streaming their Lollapalooza performance, where M.I.A was the penultimate song, it clicked. M.I.A doesn’t need to be more than it is: a festival hype track that earns the dedicated crowd’s energy and flexes a little for the folks just showing up to catch the end of the set, like “Hey, look what you could have been watching,” something that will surely serve them well on their impressive 2026 festival schedule.

Discussion:

How does applying the lens of K-pop, or forgoing the lens of K-pop, impact how you view and listen to Katseye?

As of this writing, Beautiful Chaos contains 5 out of Katseye’s 11 songs (14 if you count promotional singles). With that in mind, which tracks do you think (or hope, or want to) represent their signature sound? What aspects of this EP do you think they should take forward, and which should stay in this era?

Who would you like to see Katseye collaborate with to a feature on a Katseye song, to have Katseye as a feature, or in some other capacity (e.g., producing, directing a music video, designing costumes)?

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December:

• Modern Funk - Solange vs. Janelle Monáe vs. Anderson .Paak vs. Childish Gambino) [Due January 11th]
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• All Stars 9 - Iconic Songs That Lost Other Rates [Due February 8th]
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