When Katseye released tickets for their first tour this winter, they quickly sold out every date across the U.S. On the night of their Hammerstein Ballroom show — the first of two in New York — fans stood on line for 12 hours to make sure they could get a good view. Once inside, attendees danced along to the choreography, light sticks bobbing in the background. I pushed my way onto the floor, where gay men almost outnumbered tween girls. A man in his 30s shouted that the crowd was rowdier than Beyoncé’s. Once the group took the stage, the floor shook uncontrollably.
Katseye is an experiment: a Los Angeles–based girl group forged by a K-pop conglomerate and an American record label. Its creation was filmed and uploaded weekly for a making-of-the-band reality-competition series. Judges ranked each girl in real time in dance, vocal performance, attitude, and “star quality,” from best to worst, and fans voted for their favorites until six were selected. In 2024, Netflix released Pop Star Academy: Katseye, which chronicled the two years dozens of young women spent working their way through the grueling K-pop machine, living in dormitories and training in studios in L.A. The final members — Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Manon Bannerman, Yoonchae Jeung, Sophia Laforteza, and Megan Skiendiel — are all under 25. Two of them are queer. And only one is South Korean; the rest are Cuban Venezuelan, Filipino, Ghanaian Italian Swiss, Chinese Singaporean, and Indian.
It all seems to have worked. Since the official launch of the band and the documentary’s release, their single “Touch,” and its accompanying snappy hand choreography, has gone viral on TikTok. Last summer, they starred in a Gap denim ad that features a hypnotic dance to Kelis’s “Milkshake.” (An antidote to Sydney Sweeney’s controversial “Great Jeans” American Eagle spot, it has 61 million views on YouTube.) They booked Coachella, and before they even started touring, they were nominated for two Grammys. Though they haven’t yet released a full-length album, they’re suddenly very famous — and famous for being tight-knit. Until recently, they all lived together. They often coordinate their outfits for public appearances. The fame can come with complications. Over the summer, fans began to speculate that Manon was leaving the group. Later, Lara revealed that she has received death threats and that strangers erroneously called ICE on her about her legal status.
A few weeks after their tour, I spent a day and a half with the band trying on sunglasses, eating plates of pasta, and observing the group dynamic in this strange in-between moment.
10:52 a.m. | Meeting Up
Lara, Megan, Sophia, and Yoonchae exit their black SUV toward the first destination of the day: Wasteland, a thrift store in Silver Lake. They’re each wearing iterations of the same outfit: big jeans, tiny tops, and leather accessories. A few minutes later, Daniela walks in — she’s recovering from strep. As soon as Lara sees her, she screams her name. We’re still waiting on Manon, the eldest of the group, who texts to let us know she’s not feeling well but will join us later.
11:30 a.m. | Some Vintage Shopping
“Is this cunt?” Lara asks no one in particular, trying on an XXL camo jacket and holding a pair of knee-high Prada boots that she haggled down a few hundred bucks. They’ve each been given $300 by their label to splurge on their wardrobes. Sophia tries on a floral dress, two polka-dot tops, and a beige maxi coat. “When I want a statement piece, I go to Lara or Megan and they choose it for me,” she says. “My style is very different when I’m with Katseye. When it’s just me, I’m more plain with my outfits. It’s like slacks and basic tees.” Daniela is in her element. She glides through the store, showing off her most recent vintage find: a hot-pink Balenciaga Le City bag. Yoonchae is on a mission to buy a pair of pants. “I need new jeans,” she says, holding up some bedazzled mid-waist denim. “I wear the same pants every day, and the fans are starting to notice.” K-pop fandoms tend to have intensely parasocial relationships with their favorite groups; Katseye’s is no different. Megan is fighting to keep her social battery charged. Shopping, she says, makes her tired. Her first big purchase after the band took off was a car. “My parents suggested it,” she says.
1:05 p.m. | Power Lunch
“I’m getting ricotta toast,” Megan says. “Lemon spaghetti,” adds Lara. Sophia, the actual leader of the group, and Lara, a leader by nature, take charge of ordering at Jon & Vinny’s on Fairfax, one of their favorite restaurants. A few minutes later Manon sneaks in, joining the girls at the table. “I get sick all the time,” she says.
Manon had a reputation on Pop Star Academy for being absent from rehearsals and had to miss a date on their first North American tour owing to illness. “It’s the way I grew up,” she says. “America has a very different culture when it comes to work-life balance. You guys are all about grind and hustle. In Switzerland” — where she’s from — “if you’re sick, you take a day off. No one’s going to expect you to work.” It doesn’t help that her work ethic has been under scrutiny since day one: “Being called lazy, especially as a Black girl, is not fair. Now I feel like I always need to put in extra work to prove something, even though I really don’t.” In general, the girls describe the competition on Pop Star Academy as “intense” and “dystopian.” “The drama, the ranking. That’s not how we see each other,” says Lara. “Imagine ranking your friends and going six, five, four, three, two, one on who has the worst stage presence and who has the best. Or who’s the biggest star and who’s the least? Like, how fucking weird.”
1:25 p.m. | Talking About Texting
Our order arrives. Sophia squeezes lemon over the calamari before passing it around the table. Everyone is distracted by their phones. “Our group chat is always buzzing,” she says. (They have several, including one for daily scheduling and a logistics chat.) “Except on vacation,” Manon says. “When we were on vacation, we were like, ‘No texts.’” They laugh. “The only thing I did was say ‘Happy New Year,’” says Sophia. It’s been hard to avoid their phones, Lara says — the internet, and the fan culture that exists there, has been such a big part of their rise. “We had to learn that some content is not for us to consume. With each new eye on us, we become less and less of a human. And then your mind gets accustomed to things, and you can start to think that’s what’s normal. But then we’ll talk to each other and be like, ‘That’s crazy, right?’ Like, ‘You saw that too?’”
1:50 p.m. | Group Dynamics
Yoonchae is quiet when she’s surrounded by the group. “Fans call me maknae, which means ‘youngest,’” she tells me. It’s not her favorite descriptor: She’d rather be noticed for her vocals or her dancing. But it’s not inaccurate. At 18, she is the youngest, having been a minor when she joined the group, and was the only one who learned English during training. “I don’t have my own home,” she says. She lives with Sophia. Manon lives with Daniela. Megan and Lara live separately; they have family in the area and a similar circle of friends, including former Pop Star Academy contestant Adéla. “I always say if me and Megan went to school together, we would have been friends,” Lara says, twirling her pasta. “We gravitate toward a similar scene.” They all tease Daniela about her high-school “VSCO girl” phase; Sophia reveals she was the president of the glee club. “Girl, I was whitewashed,” Daniela says, laughing. “But that was Atlanta.”
2:15 p.m. | Time for the Fitting
“See you at Coachella,” our waitress says as we leave the restaurant. Everyone piles into a Sprinter van to head to a fitting. (Going to a fitting for Katseye is like getting on the subway for me: an annoying, routine part of the week.) They’re catatonic, sunglasses on, staring straight ahead. Half of them were sick when they arrived, and the other half are starting to feel sick from the car ride. “Everybody had something to say” when their single “Gnarly” came out, Sophia tells me. All of their songs have bold, confident lyrics (in “Gnarly”: “Hottie hottie, like a bag of Takis / I’m the shit”), but it was the first time they’d experienced the media-discourse machine on such an intense level — fans thought the song was too sexual and abrasive. Online, death threats and racist attacks poured in. “We had to remind ourselves what our feelings were when we first heard the song and how excited we were to make it, because we were consuming what everyone else had to say once it was out,” Sophia says. None of the backlash has seemed to deter them. Their latest single, “Internet Girl,” is about seeing opinions about themselves online. I ask them about the line that’s gotten the most attention: “Eat zucchini,” which they repeat in sync. “It means eat a dick,” says Lara matter-of-factly, even though the song wasn’t written by any of the group’s members. “It’s quite obvious, I think.”
3 p.m. | Clothing Swap
Everyone takes turns trying on their outfits. Lara and Megan go first while Sophia heads outside to get ice cream from a food truck attached to the studio. Yoonchae shows Manon what she bought at Wasteland, and eventually they’re all running behind poster boards to change. “We’re switching outfits,” yells Sophia, walking back into the main room with Yoonchae. The girls are excited to try on looks from some of the same designers they eyed earlier at the thrift store. “Obviously, there are moments where I’m like, Damn, I wish that dress was mine,” says Manon. “But there are a billion more opportunities.”
7 p.m. | Pop Sisterhood
After the fitting, the girls are eager to go to a live taping of World Scout: The Final Piece, a follow-up show to Pop Star Academy meant to create a brand-new girl group. Three of the members have already been selected, and all of them were on Pop Star with Katseye: Emily Kelavos, Samara Siqueira, and Lexie Levin. “We stopped by their rehearsal this morning,” says Sophia. “It was surreal to be back in that environment.” They joke that the new girl group’s rehearsal space is nicer than theirs was.
9 a.m. | The Morning of the Shoot
Sophia beats the others to the studio for a photo shoot. She is skilled at keeping everyone on track. Her communication style as the designated leader of Katseye, she says, is “pretty blunt.” The main thing, she says, is making sure everyone is onboard with every decision. “It can’t just be like, ‘Four or five girls are okay with this,’” Sophia explains, “because the one person who isn’t, it really does affect the group.” Daniela’s giggly squeal interrupts us. “I’m bleeding,” she announces, running over to João Moraes, Katseye’s visual director. Lara had been snapping pics of her after their last group shot when the laces of Daniela’s knee-high Alexander McQueen boots caught on each other and she tumbled into a light.
4:30 p.m. | Chitchatting at Wrap-up
“We all know that we all have goals beyond Katseye,” Lara tells me, “and we talk about it a lot with each other, actually. We each have such different styles of music and different tastes. But they’re, like, my fucking besties. I want them to win so badly, and I know they want me to win.” While talk of solo aspirations comes with a lot of excitement, it also comes with some fear. “When One Direction split, that was really hard,” says Manon. “I don’t want our fans to go through that. I don’t want to be responsible for breaking so many hearts.” Still, Daniela and Manon want to act, and Sophia loves musical theater. “I really want to play Kim in Miss Saigon,” she says. “Or voice a Disney princess.” But they can’t run the risk of thinking too far ahead just yet. “Katseye,” Manon says, “is going to stay Katseye for a while.”
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