They were built by a system. Then they outgrew it. With their 2026 AMA New Artist of the Year win, KATSEYE have answered the question the industry didn’t know it was asking.
The Experiment That Worked
The pitch was almost absurdly ambitious: take K-pop’s notoriously exacting idol-training methodology — the vocal drills, the synchronized choreography, the years of disciplined self-erasure — and apply it to a group of young women who had never shared a language, a timezone, or a culture. Then sign them to a joint venture between HYBE, the Korean entertainment conglomerate behind BTS, and Geffen Records, one of the most storied labels in American pop history. Then film the whole thing for YouTube, and later, Netflix.
Over 120,000 people submitted auditions. Twenty were selected. Six survived.
In November 2023, Sophia Laforteza, Daniela Avanzini, Lara Rajagopalan, Megan Skiendiel, Manon Bannerman, and Yoonchae Jeung were announced as KATSEYE — named after the cat’s eye gemstone, a stone that refracts into different colors depending on the angle you view it from. The metaphor was a little on-the-nose. It was also completely accurate.
Six Cities, Six Coming-Of-Age Stories
Before KATSEYE was a group, it was six separate stories that had no reason to converge.
Sophia was born in Manila to a Filipino musical theater actress, and began singing at three. By the time she was a teenager, she was competing in shows, carrying the particular weight of a child who grew up watching a parent perform and quietly decided she wanted the same life. Leaving the Philippines to train in Los Angeles, she would later say: if she didn’t have this group, she didn’t know how far she would have made it.
Daniela, born in Atlanta to a mother who was the first Cuban to win a world ballroom championship, began dancing at four — taught, from the very beginning, by her mother. She appeared on America’s Got Talent at age nine, and made the Top 10 of So You Think You Can Dance: The Next Generation in 2016. Dancing was not something Daniela chose so much as something she was handed, and decided to keep.
Lara Rajagopalan, first-generation Indian American, taught herself production software, wrote her own songs, made her own beats. She and her sister recorded covers of Destiny’s Child and Rihanna. That’s how HYBE and Geffen found her. Growing up, she was demoralized by the near-total absence of Indian representation in mainstream entertainment. She kept going anyway. In 2025, she accepted the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Blooming Impact Award — her KATSEYE members on stage beside her when she did.
Megan Skiendiel grew up in Honolulu, began dancing at four, and credits her mother as her number-one supporter in a way that sounds genuine rather than rehearsed. She sat out a portion of the Asian tour in 2024 with a back injury — one of those quiet details that cuts through the choreographed perfection of the idol world and reminds you these are actual bodies, with actual limits.
Manon Bannerman was born in Lucerne, Switzerland, to a Swiss-Italian mother and a Ghanaian father, speaks four languages, and spent much of her adolescence trying to blend in. “In Switzerland, I would try to fit in as much as possible and not bring my culture everywhere,” she has said. KATSEYE gave her, for perhaps the first time, an audience that wanted her to bring it everywhere. In early 2026, she announced a temporary hiatus for personal health reasons — a moment that generated significant media attention and, for some commentators, broader questions about the treatment of Black women in high-intensity performance industries.
Yoonchae Jeung came from Seoul, the group’s youngest member and only Korean national, debuting at sixteen. She has said BTS is the reason she got into K-pop. There’s something quietly poetic about that — a Korean girl inspired by a Korean group, folded into an international project designed to take the K out of K-pop and send it somewhere new.
A Name That Does the Work
The group’s name was partly proposed by Lara, who suggested spelling it with a “K” — a nod to their connection to K-pop culture, and to their modern edge. Six women from six cities across three continents, each refracting something different. The stone doesn’t choose which color it shows you. That depends on where you’re standing.
Their creative director, Humberto Leon, describes his goal as foregrounding “uniformity while celebrating all of their individualness” — a formulation that sounds contradictory until you’ve watched them perform. The styling leans into Y2K references — low-rise jeans, crop tops, archival pieces — while weaving in cultural specificity: a bindi for Lara, waist beads for Manon. Decoration as identity. Costume as autobiography.
The First Era: Soft, and Deliberately So
KATSEYE’s debut single, “Debut,” dropped in June 2024. It was upbeat, confident, two minutes and three seconds long — possibly the shortest K-pop-adjacent single on record. The brevity felt like a statement. Or maybe just a constraint. Hard to tell, that early.
What followed it was “Touch” — a melodic drum-and-bass R&B track that discussed, per the official description, “the complexity of love.” It became a TikTok phenomenon not primarily because of the song itself but because of the choreography, which spread as a dance challenge and gave the group their first genuinely viral moment.
Their debut EP, SIS (Soft Is Strong), released in August 2024, was produced with significant firepower: Ryan Tedder, Omer Fedi, and Bang Si-hyuk among the collaborators. The five songs — none of them crossing three minutes — added up to just over eleven minutes of music. The EP debuted at number 119 on the Billboard 200, while the group landed atop the Emerging Artists chart.
The critical response was polite, measured, and faintly restless. Reviewers noted that diversifying beyond what one called “wispy, cloud-like tracks” would allow for more versatility and experimentation in KATSEYE’s sound. The EP was a well-made introduction. It was also, unmistakably, a controlled one — a version of KATSEYE that had been designed more than discovered.
The Second Era: Beautiful, and Chaotic
Something shifted in the months between SIS and Beautiful Chaos — and much of that shift happened in real time, in front of fans, on Weverse live streams. KATSEYE went viral in K-pop spheres for their foul-mouthed, high-energy broadcasts, and that honest intensity began to shape the sound of what was coming next.
“Gnarly,” the lead single, is a hyperpop fever dream — braggadocious and tongue-in-cheek, with generous cursing and knife-slashing sound effects. It became their first entry on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was built from a demo by Alice Longyu Gao, and it announced something unambiguous: the group that once introduced itself with pastel pop was done being soft.
“Gabriela” followed — featuring acoustic guitar, a telenovela-inspired music video complete with a finger amputation and a Succession-style corporate power struggle, and a Spanish-language bridge delivered by Daniela. It was the first time one member’s native cultural inheritance had been embedded structurally into the music, not as a garnish but as the bridge itself. The song was co-written with Charli XCX.
“M.I.A.,” the EP’s closer, steers toward the club — reasserting self-worth over a gritty, throbbing beat. It ends with the group ready to dash into the night. The lyrical posture — defiant, uncontainable — felt less like a pop song and more like a mission statement from six young women who had spent years being shaped by other people’s ideas of who they should be.
Beautiful Chaos debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 — the group’s highest-charting release to date, and their first entry in the top ten. The label described the EP’s core message as “celebrating confusion.” Which is maybe another way of saying: we are not a finished product. We are a process.
What the Critics Heard (And What They Missed)
Pitchfork gave Beautiful Chaos a 5.5, calling it “awfully ordinary” while noting that “Gnarly” offered “a glimpse into what Katseye could do to live up to their promise.” AllMusic gave it two out of five stars. The consensus among professional reviewers was something like: promising, but not yet.
That criticism is not entirely wrong, and it’s not entirely fair either. The expectation that a group barely eighteen months out of a survival competition should already have a fully formed artistic identity — distinct, cohesive, undeniable — ignores how identity actually develops. It especially ignores how identity develops when you’re doing it in public, with the entire K-pop internet watching.
What KATSEYE have demonstrated across two EPs is not a finished voice. It’s a direction. And the direction has been, consistently, toward more of themselves — louder, less managed, more willing to let the cultural specificity of six different women show up in the actual music rather than just the press releases.
Why the AMA Win Makes Sense
The New Artist of the Year award from the American Music Awards is not always a recognition of critical consensus. Sometimes it’s something more interesting — a recognition of cultural arrival. Of the moment when a new act crosses over from “act to watch” to “act that is already here.”
KATSEYE arrived in stages. The TikTok choreography. The Netflix documentary that let fans watch the selection process unfold in real time. The Weverse streams that made the group feel accessible, a little unpolished, genuinely funny. The Beautiful Chaos Tour, their first full North American concert run, which sold out. Lara’s award from the Los Angeles LGBT Center, her bandmates on stage to present it.
None of it looks like the traditional K-pop playbook. None of it looks like the traditional American pop playbook either. It looks like something in between, still being invented.
As Daniela put it: they are “the first American girl group to make American pop music but trained to do the crazy choreography of K-pop.” That hyphen — between the two industries, the two traditions, the two sets of expectations — is where KATSEYE actually live. And it turns out, there’s more room there than anyone expected.
Six Lights, Still Refracting
The cat’s eye doesn’t show you everything at once. The color you see depends on your angle, your distance, your willingness to move.
KATSEYE, two years into a career that was designed before they had any say in its design, are beginning to redesign it themselves. Not dramatically, not all at once — but track by track, bridge by bridge, live stream by chaotic live stream. Six women from six different places, learning in real time what it means to be a group that belongs somewhere entirely new.
The 2026 AMA win is a timestamp, not a verdict. The experiment, it turns out, is still running.
Sources：
Wikipedia — Katseye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katseye
Variety — Katseye on the Timely Meaning Behind New ‘Beautiful Chaos’ EP https://variety.com/2025/music/news/katseye-beautiful-chaos-ep-big-transitional-part-1236417368/
Apple Music — SIS (Soft Is Strong) EP https://music.apple.com/us/album/sis-soft-is-strong-ep/1753359526
Netflix / Tudum — Who Are the Members of KATSEYE? https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/dream-academy-girl-group-member-guide
KATSEYE Official — The Story of KATSEYE https://www.katseye.world/story-of-katseye/
Tuko — All Katseye K-Pop Group Members https://www.tuko.co.ke/facts-lifehacks/celebrity-biographies/605958-all-katseye-k-pop-group-members-leading-band/
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