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Ever since the members of KATSEYE were selected from a cutthroat Netflix competition that trimmed 120,000 applicants down to six perfect humans, it’s felt like the band has been trying to course-correct from that original sin. The members had to swallow their idiosyncrasies to make the cut, and they claim that every new project now feels like they’re getting closer to their “raw” and “authentic” selves. They’ve done this by gesturing at emotional honesty and getting wackier and campier with tunes like the endearingly grating “Gnarly,” which only became listenable to me after about the 40th time. For the most part, though, the sum of this band is not worth more than its parts, especially when the parts are arranged and optimized by the HYBE-Geffen machine. Wild tries to crank up the moxie and chaos, but it can only paper over an inner emptiness.
The headrush of the lead single offered some hope. In one tight verse of “PINKY UP,” Yoonchae and Megan cram in a Socrates reference, Daniela twerks in the parking lot, Sophia gurgles a giddy “I lovе you, you love me, we batshit, oui, oui,” and a fat bassline goes turbo. Much of KATSEYE’s music is about pilfering sounds across the globe and making it their own with dippy, raw-feels chitchat that calls to mind riffing at a sleepover. Here, it’s a sample of Da Hool’s 1997 trance classic “Meet Her at the Love Parade.” The mix of womping low-end with the incongruous visual of them holding their “pinkies up” at teatime is tastefully doofy.
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The rest of the EP flounders between failed zeitgeist references and hello-kids embarrassment. “Bel Air” tries to jack some Charli xcx swag by upcycling a demo that was sitting online for years, but the original washes its offspring. KATSEYE’s version smothers the track in constipated bass, and instead of Charli’s yearning voice, the five women just sound like they’re reading lines from a script. “Hootie Frutti” is a double ripoff, lightly adjusting Ice Spice’s hook from “Thootie” and spraying it over rote Brazilian funk mayhem. Daniela hurls a line in Portuguese, but the whole thing feels about as real as when Kanye donned funk on the feeble “Paperwork.” This is a top-down prefab girl group, so I don’t expect them to get real about the fallout after their sixth member, Manon, went on hiatus this year, or to sing conflictedly about how excruciating Pop Star Academy was (as they’ve started to do in interviews). But why is Yoonchae saddled with lines about matcha and Erewhon smoothies? Is this their raw authentic selves?
These songs have a beautiful hollowness that comes from making music about things that could’ve been performed by anyone else and mean nothing to you. The nothingest of them all is “Animal,” a song about twisting and tangling in the late-night hours with someone who’s “off the scale that goes from hot to crazy,” which means they are “the boss,” they “run the circus,” they don’t follow schedules, and other things that probably don’t even sound cool to the EYEKONS that make up their stanbase. Co-written by Ed Sheeran, the track is a puddle of lyrical and instrumental clichés that conjures up a lovably demented crush less than the image of sitting at the mall food court, and which loses track of its own whisker of a narrative by the song’s end. When Sophia sings, “Want you to give it to me/All night long,” the beat soars like a motivational Disney theme song.
The voices on the EP start to blend together as they harmonize and cross between shrill runs and moodier verses. Maybe it’s the way the voices are treated—always stacked, trailing with reverb—but they often sound similarly bold yet airy. It’s common to see fans in comments surprised when they discover who’s singing a bit. The symmetry is impressive, but it means there are rarely standout solo moments.
The slinky vocal interplay on “That Way” shakes up the monotony a little. “You could be mine, if you’re lucky/You might even get the privilege to touch me,” Sophia sings, her staccato syllables accented by Lara’s bright hoos. There’s a sweet pre-chorus from Lara and Yoonchae, where Lara sings like she’s being sucked into a vacuum and Yoonchae’s voice is multitracked to have an almost uncanny alien texture. The song has a jerky, fighting-for-attention (dis)harmony that suits KATSEYE’s giddy spirit better than the many songs where they all seem to dissolve into one ultra-voice. Still, there’s something fascinating about the bulk of their music’s distinct indistinctness. It’s an uber-expensive vision of what globalized pop in the 2020s should sound like, anchored by an Avengers lineup of vocalists handpicked from around the world. It’s the sound of the times, or what the industry thinks is “the times”: placeless, breathy, and willfully cringe in a way that’s meant to symbolize “zany zoomers” but hits more like RNG TikTok fodder.
