KATSEYE performed ‘Animal’ and ‘Hootie Frutti’ on the ‘SNL’ season 52 premiere, the first girl group on the show since 2001
KATSEYE‘s Saturday Night Live debut arrived with a statistic attached. When the group took the Studio 8H stage on Saturday (Sept. 26) for the season 52 premiere, they became the first girl group to perform on the show since Destiny’s Child in 2001. That 25-year gap says as much about the commercial collapse of the format in America as it does about how quickly KATSEYE have climbed.
They played “Animal” and “Hootie Frutti,” both from Wild, the five-track EP released in August, on an episode hosted by New York Knicks captain Jalen Brunson. Four of the six members performed: Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Megan Skiendiel and Yoonchae Jeung. Manon Bannerman and Sophia Laforteza remain on hiatus, both having stepped back to focus on their mental health.
The staging did real work. For “Animal,” the quartet shed black jackets mid-song to reveal feathered and jewelled outfits under hard red light. “Hootie Frutti” moved to a set built like a tropical juice bar, with choreography that played at picking and tasting fruit. They also turned up in a pre-taped sketch spoofing The Debut: Dream Academy, the competition series that created them, with Brunson playing a choreographer named Dorian Flynt. Parodying your own origin story on network television two years into a career requires a certain confidence.
The Numbers Behind the Booking
The commercial case for the slot is straightforward. Wild debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 170,000 first-week units, the group’s first chart-topper and the largest week for an all-female group since 2014.
“Animal,” co-written by Ed Sheeran alongside Johnny McDaid and produced by Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin, arrived in July ahead of the EP and entered the Hot 100 at No. 24, a career-best debut. It was the fifth consecutive solo single the group has placed on the chart, following “Gnarly,” “Gabriela,” “Internet Girl” and “Pinky Up.” Their Spotify listenership has passed 30 million monthly at points this year.
The television run has been deliberate and sequenced. A Tonight Show performance in August, a Today summer concert slot days later, and now the SNL season premiere, the booking that still functions in the US as a signal that a label is serious about an act.
Built for This
KATSEYE were assembled in 2023 through The Debut: Dream Academy, a joint venture between HYBE and Universal’s Geffen Records, narrowing roughly 120,000 applicants down to six. The proposition was to apply K-pop training infrastructure to a globally sourced group built for the Western market. A No. 1 album, an arena tour and a Studio 8H booking amount to the verdict on whether that works.
The group is careful about the framing. “I’d say our music is not K-pop, but it is heavily inspired by it,” Avanzini told Allure in June. The industry has not fully settled the question either: KATSEYE went into this year’s MTV Video Music Awards nominated in four categories, including best group and best K-pop.
There is no pause built into the schedule. Their 31-date Wildworld arena tour, their first at that scale, opened in Europe earlier this month and moves to North America in October, beginning in Miami before heading into Canada, turning west, and closing in Mexico City in November. A Jingle Ball run follows.
A group that began as a televised experiment has become the act television books. That loop closed about as publicly as it could.
