Katseye Knows They're "Gnarly"

This piece originally appeared on May 16, 2025 in Sound Signal, our biweekly newsletter that identifies emerging artists, scenes, and trending tracks, crafted by the world's best writers and curators. Sign up here to never miss our take on what's next in music.

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It seems like every day, stan culture is hitting a new peak: devotion to today’s modern pop star comes in the form of mass-led streaming campaigns, detailed accounts of upcoming music in Twitter threads, and even raising over a million dollars for social justice causes. Amid all this fervor, any pop music writer knows to put their social media accounts on private when they write anything even slightly negative about a big musician, on account of how predatory and intense their fans can be online.

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But, with their latest hyperpop single “Gnarly,” global girl group Katseye (co-created by US label Geffen and Korea’s HYBE, the label behind BTS) is taking a new approach: they seem to be intentionally courting controversy rather than just admiration. They posted a TikTok promoting the song that warned fans that they might not like it at first, but that it would grow on them eventually.

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Just as they predicted, the song has been igniting mixed responses. On Reddit, commenters have been talking about how the instrumental is very interesting, but the lyrics—which describe everything from “boba tea” to “Tesla” to “this song” as gnarly—are repetitive, cringey, and vague. The reference to Tesla in particular upset fans as it felt like an endorsement, though the group have said that the term can be either positive or negative. On YouTube, comments on the music video are similarly united in their confusion, praising the girls’ choreography and songs’ beat, but belaboring that its random lyrics do a disservice to the singers’ excellent vocals. Some commenters have even made meta comments about how this is the first time they’ve seen so many people express so many negative views in one place.

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But this approach of stirring up controversy around the song seems to be working. “Gnarly” has racked up 28.M Spotify streams in the 14 days since its release. By comparison, last year’s single “Touch,” which is the group’s most streamed song today with 285.3M overall streams, had 6.3M streams after 14 days, and “Debut,” which today has 83M streams, had 1.3M streams after 14 days. And, as W Magazine reported, a few days after its release, some fans started commenting that the song is growing on them, and that they see the lyrics as ironic and campy rather than earnest and cringey. Celebrities like Reneé Rapp and Camila Mendes have also been using the song on short form video. It seems like the musical and lyrical risk the group took seems to be paying off, and could speak to a future of big swings and experiments in their future.