Client: DAZED
In mid-September, when KATSEYE – Daniela, Lara, Manon, Yoonchae, Sophia, and Megan (absent from this interview due to injury) – stepped onto a tiny stage set in a multi-storey Manila shopping mall, they were shocked. There were fans, rows deep, crammed against the railings on each floor.
“I thought it was going to be the first floor, maybe some people on the second, but the mall turned into a stadium,” says Sophia, the group’s Filipino member. “Growing up, I’d shop there with my mom and grandmother. There wasn’t a single moment of silence. When we tried to talk, they’d start chanting our names. It was crazy.”
In a heady and triumphant year for women in pop, with a welcome avalanche of earworm choruses, viral dances, memes and outfits, record-breaking festival crowds and tours, KATSEYE’s “Touch”, with its sweet stammer of a chorus and an easily replicated finger dance, made its viral mark after its release in late July, blowing up across TikTok.
It was a pivotal, vital moment for the band.
A month earlier, they’d released their first track, the catchy and confident “Debut”, seven months (an eternity in the pop-sphere) after being formed via the survival show The Debut: Dream Academy. The brainchild of a partnership between American label Geffen and K-pop mega-corporation HYBE, its executives undertook an expensive risk: no non-K-pop, performance-led pop group had made a dent in the US charts in years.
The Debut: Dream Academy would eschew a regular format by airing on only social media and in short form, focusing more on dancing and vocal skills and less on spotlighting big personalities. And though based in Los Angeles, the group was to be multi-national (KATSEYE’s members are Ghanaian-Swiss-Italian, Filipino, Korean, Indian-American, Cuban-American and Chinese-Singaporean-American).
Taylor Glasby 