“Cannibal” would have been too off-brand this month…
[Video]
[4.33]
Kayla Beardslee: One of their better singles.
[3]
Katherine St. Asaph: Katseye continue their rickety ride toward their destined immortality: future threads of messy moments. Their destiny is a thread on Twitter — or optimistically, on some non-Mecha-Hitler equivalent — because they conduct their career like a Twitter slop account. They spam out would-be event singles at a nigh-unfollowable pace, with too little time between releases for listeners to imprint and memories to form. Quality control is not their priority; more concerningly, neither is presenting an image of success. I don’t mean to be insensitive here, as public messiness is often the monetization of private pain, but girl groups are not supposed to be losing members before their debut album. The emperor has no imperial period. What do you even do with that? Set your sights lower and release a Maroon 5 song (Ed Sheeran in this case; close enough), and get yourself a solid radio airplay slot between Marshmello and Teddy Swims. Strictly remain within this genre’s parameters: songs about a romantasy beast of a lover who moves like “an animal” (hummingbird? termite? quahog clam?), who is “off the scale that goes from hot to crazy” — a meme that, per Barney Stinson and the Franklin Board of Aldermen, is not a scale but a Cartesian plane — and who does not listen to music like this.
[5]
Claire Davidson: I may not have liked the low-effort ragebait that has defined Katseye’s past few singles, but the corrective to that was not a single co-written by Ed Sheeran—a low-effort return to the status quo, in other words. “Animal” doesn’t even retain any of the distinctive quirks of Sheeran’s songwriting: there are no head-tilting gestures at intimacy or oddball sonic contrasts here. Instead, the track plays like a half-remembered “APT.” rewrite without any of its propellant energy, built from nothing but a loping bassline and brittle acoustic guitar. The central refrain of “you move like an animal” couldn’t be more ill-fitting; everything about this song is predictably, rigidly programmed.
[5]
David Allun Jones: Like “Gabriela”, the last attempt by Katseye to strike a “real pop” pose, the desperate, calculated radio bait of “Animal” initially sours the senses, like that first whiff of leftovers left in the car overnight. Also like “Gabriela,” that same careful curation will probably also break you down until you’re giddily miming the choreography on TikTok. Ed Sheeran and his ‘Avengers Assemble’ team of pop-craft experts unleash the aural equivalent of “retro”, “fun”, “bad girl on the town” Post-It notes on a whiteboard, as the ladies slink through a ‘60s spy-pop shuffle to self-inspire themselves into being that chick. Is its Kidz Bop-ified attempt at primal sex kitten corny? Mr. “Shape of You” is involved, so yes. But this YA “Dirrty” is an OK-enough palate cleanser before the group make their eventual U-turn back to their signature hyper-pop-chaos theatrics.
[6]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: When the fandom said it wanted songs less brazenly offensive to the ear as “Pinky Up” and “Hutti Tutti,” the answer was not an Ed Sheeran co-write advertising Jolibee. This sounds so inoffensively sterile that it should have soundtracked their Gap commercial.
[2]
Julian Axelrod: If you Westernize K-pop enough times, it eventually starts to sound like Meghan Trainor. Were Manon and Sophia the only ones who had Alice Longyu Gao’s number?
[4]
Nortey Dowuona: “My father told me, son don’t you get involved in, politics, religion, other people’s quarrels.” “How was I to know? It’s a crazy thing; I showed you my hand and you still let me win.” “Oh, I’m in pieces, it’s tearing me up; but I know a heart that’s been broken is a heart that’s been loved.” Thank you, Ed & Johnny. I needed that.
[6]
Andrew Karpan: Drifting deeper into the pablum of what I distantly remember pop music to sound like in 2018, Sheeran’s work gluing together sounds to be used on the latest Katseye record is almost moving, if foggily meaningless. What exactly is the conceptual animal being signified? A kind of shapeshifting shadow that haunts a maze of handclaps and confused gestures of grace and empowerment. At least when Trent Reznor said this, we knew what he was talking about.
[4]
Tim de Reuse: I can’t enjoy a song that claims, textually, to be about messy, sweaty, instinct-driven sex, while sounding so antiseptically clean. Those sexless acoustic guitar strums belong in an Ed Sheeran B-side about how much he loves his mum, or something.
[3]
Taylor Alatorre: You can’t fault them totally for the song’s overt lack of personality, because the only way to reliably write and perform songs in this genre — Odes to Headboard-Pounding Sex That Are Lyrically Just Mild Enough to Be Tolerated by Your Grandparents in the Car — is to adopt a contorted persona that no living human actually has. Such are the pitiless demands of the radio programmer. Even so, it’s a shame to see a group with such unformed potential get whittled down into an interchangeable CHR widget. “Gnarly”‘s iconoclasm may have been procured for them, but at least they adopted it as their own, turning Katseye into a symbol of pop’s kaleidoscopic possibilities. “Animal””s sound is instead that of fear — of iconoclasm, of their own identity, and very possibly a self-fulfilling fear of pending irrelevance.
[2]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Is this a Meghan Trainor type-beat? Are our most daringly middling pop deconstructionists paying tribute to Fitz & The Tantrums? For all of the chaos that has surrounded this group of women, indeterminate in count and style, they have not yet managed to make even a single interesting song; the best track on their EP was neither this nor the latest iteration of Operation “Gnarly” but a Sucker-era Charli XCX demo. A miserable state of affairs for all involved parties, including Ed Sheeran.
[2]
Ian Mathers: Is there discourse this time? I don’t know why I’m asking, I don’t actually want to know. Katseye once again prove they’re perfectly good at a less divisive, less distinctive, I would say less fun style. I should have given “Iconic By Mistake” an [8].
[7]
Jel Bugle: Sounds like Pink — quite restrained and bordering on boring/mature new sound. They were better when they were gnarly.
[5]
Jacob Satter: Baldface pastiche like this requires joy for redemption. Luckily, Katseye excels at packing giddy pleasure into carefully metered, market-friendly product. A fully-formed, easy to repeat summer fun bop that delivers in under three minutes? That’s a magic number!
[7]
Al Varela: The credit should really go to Omer Fedi and Blake Slatkin, who have pretty much perfected this style of modern pop song. I guess some credit goes to Ed Sheeran too, since he did write this and presumably did the guitarwork (if not, it’s very much in his style), but I’d rather he not continue tossing his leftovers to other artists who are never gonna make the most of them. “Animal” is decent girl group pop akin to what we had with Fifth Harmony and Little Mix in the 2010s, which I do have a bit of a nostalgic soft spot too. But it doesn’t reach the delirious heights of Fifth Harmony’s “I’m In Love With A Monster” (which this song bears some resemblance to) or Little Mix’s “Touch”, so “decent” can only get you so far.
[6]
Joshua Lu: There are many things in pop music that I want to blame Ed Sheeran for ruining, but Katseye has not needed his help to be this boring before. It’s fascinating how easily they alternate between releasing the worst music ever (complimentary) and the worst music ever (derogatory).
[3]
Alex Clifton: “Animal” isn’t stellar, but it is an insight into what Katseye could be if Hybe x Geffen treated them like a band instead of flashing dollar signs. It’s an improvement over their post-“Gnarly” material by virtue of being an actual song, rather than a nonsensical spoken non-sequitur surrounded by a lot of electronic bwomp-bwomps, created specifically to go viral on TikTok. Instead, “Animal” sounds like a lesser Red Velvet song (complimentary). It’s a bit bland, lacking in the attitude that made “Gnarly” famous—having an Ed Sheeran credit may have sanded off the harsher edges—but it is nice to be reminded that the members of Katseye are actually good at singing rather than existing as meme machines. It’s a shame that they are only now getting some good material, given that the group sounds like they are skirting collapse due to a grueling schedule and piss-poor management. I genuinely hope they are able to make it.
[6]
Leah Isobel: I don’t really know what to say here. As TSJ’s resident Eyekon, I am always trying to find things to like about Katseye’s music. At their best, when their penchant for cartoon absurdity meets the assembly-line precision of their delivery, they can create pop magic. The disconnect between those aspects of their collective personality draws out a strange relatability: If any one of us were plugged into a popstar bootcamp and then, upon graduation, asked to rehearse for 10 hours a day, we might also be able to absolutely slay some choreography — and we might also develop a very strange sense of humor to cope with the ridiculousness of getting everything we ever wanted and then being asked to work insane hours to hold onto it. Dream Academy, the show that formed them, is that disjunction made literal: the disciplining of the abstract, the dream made teachable, transmittable. The promise is that it’s possible for anyone. But, as Manon’s “hiatus” has demonstrated, the threat is also that it’s possible for anyone. Your greatest value when you come through the pipeline is, literally, the moment of emergence; everything after that, every imperfect reaction or choice, degrades your value. So what do you do, if your whole life depends on channeling your dream into product, and yourself along with it? Maybe you hide yourself in the song, behind a crunchy anonymizing layer of distortion, or the voices of your coworkers, or the soothing embrace of Melodyne perfection. Maybe you come to appreciate the smooth and inoffensive mechanical precision of an Ed Sheeran cowrite, or at least the easy marketability of his name. Maybe you turn a song that is textually about sex into a song that is about selling your image. Maybe the video dramatizes your relationship with your bosses at the label, playfully recuperating a fundamentally exploitative relationship into mere evidence of the dream. Maybe you see that you are the dream, but the dream is the machine, so you are also the machine. Maybe you hate it, or maybe you love it, but it doesn’t matter, because a machine can’t reciprocate; a machine, unlike an animal, can’t feel. Maybe you learn to admire it.
[2]