Manon

The member who came from Switzerland

KATSEYE, the group Manon (마농) belongs to, is the girl group on HYBE x Geffen Records, the label HYBE and the American Geffen Records set up together. The city the official members page prints beside her name is Lucerne, and in August 2024 Grammy.com reported that she grew up in Switzerland and that her parents are Swiss Italian and Ghanaian.

The Swiss press narrows that city down. In September 2025 the Luzerner Zeitung introduced her as being from Sursee, in the canton of Lucerne, and reported that she grew up in Sursee and in Zurich. The same piece wrote that more than 100,000 people applied to the audition she took part in.

The Swiss press names her Meret Manon Bannerman. In a November 2023 interview with the Zurich daily Tages-Anzeiger, Manon explained that Manon is her second name. During an exchange year in Los Angeles her school pronounced Meret so oddly that she put her second name first — and that, she said, worked better.

Wanting the stage

In the same interview Manon said she had wanted to be on stage since she was small: “I want to inspire others.” She sang a lot as a child and wrote her first songs of her own on a ukulele as a teenager. She has never released any of them — “I’m a perfectionist,” she said. Before the show, the only place she had appeared on screen was in other musicians’ music videos; the paper named the Appenzell pop musician Benjamin Amaru and the German rapper Badchieff.

The passion she named in that interview was songwriting. “I’m writing more than ever right now,” she said. “So much is happening, my head is so full in the evenings. It helps to write everything down.”

From the audition to the debut

The place Manon won was on The Debut: Dream Academy, broadcast in 2023. The audition, run jointly by labels in two countries, cut the applicants down to twenty who competed on camera, and the six who remained became KATSEYE. The debut date was 28 June 2024.

According to the Tages-Anzeiger, Manon learned in May 2022 that she had been chosen as a contestant, and for more than a year, until the project went public, she could tell no one. Coming from a small country like Switzerland, she said, she expected to be turned down, and she called the day the acceptance came “definitely one of the best days of my life”. She had to catch up on dance in Switzerland before she left for Los Angeles — 20 Minuten placed that practice at Tanzwerk 101, a dance studio in Zurich — and said: “I underestimated dancing. It’s much harder than I thought.” Training in Los Angeles began on 4 January 2023.

At the live finale in November 2023, Manon was one of the five who presented ‘Dirty Water’; the official video on the HYBE LABELS + channel credits the stage to five names, Lara and Sophia among them. In an August 2024 interview with the Swiss music site Starzone, she named the moment the dream felt real as the live show in which she was chosen for the group, and said the feeling grew when work on the EP began and she heard ‘Touch’ for the first time. What she missed most in Los Angeles, she said, was Swiss fresh water and the mountains.

What she said, and the parts she played, in 2025

Talking to Rolling Stone in June 2025 about the second EP, BEAUTIFUL CHAOS, Manon said: “We’ve paid a lot more attention to detail.” In the recording booth, she explained, the members “try each other’s parts”, and whatever sounds best is what stays. The same magazine reported in July that each member played a monster drawn from her own cultural background in the music video for the Monster High remake of ‘Fright Song’, and that Manon became a sea monster and sang her lines from under water.

In a solo interview with Billboard Philippines in August 2025 she said: “I remember back in Switzerland, I would try to fit in as much as possible.” Now, she added, “being able to represent my culture, it honestly is like one of my favorite things about this.” When KATSEYE won Push Performance of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2025, the Swiss public broadcaster SRF and 20 Minuten led the news with Manon’s name, and 20 Minuten wrote that she sometimes teaches the other members a little Swiss German.

The records and the stages Manon has been part of since the debut remain on the uploads on the official KATSEYE YouTube channel.