Debut

The song

‘Debut’ is the KATSEYE single released on 28 June 2024, the group’s first. Korea JoongAng Daily reported on 14 June 2024, two weeks before the release, that Hybe and Geffen Records had set the group’s debut for 28 June.

The album introduction describes the song as a summer track with a lively, brisk sense of rhythm, and says the six members — Daniela, Lara, Manon, Megan, Sophia and Yoonchae — came together through the audition programme The Debut: Dream Academy, broadcast from September to November 2023. The same text prints the credits: Ryan Tedder, Tyler Spry and Grant Boutin produced it, Omer Fedi shares the writing credit, and Gregory Ohrel directed the music video.

The song opens the group’s first mini album SIS (Soft Is Strong), released on 16 August 2024.

Reviews

NME’s Mika Chen spent a paragraph on the song in a review of that mini album, published on 16 August 2024. The review opens the paragraph on a line from the song — “Ohh We-ee-ee ain’t flexin’ babe we do what we do,” the group boldly declare in their aptly named debut single, ‘Debut’ — and then places the song at a starting point: “Beginning their journey in discovering that strength comes in more forms than one, this high-energy pop anthem balances its exciting chorus with sing-talk verses that ooze attitude.”

Idology (아이돌로지), a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, named KATSEYE in its rookies-of-2024 selection on 26 February 2025, with this single and SIS (Soft Is Strong) as the two records the entry judges. The page states in its own words that it assigns no ranking. Mano, who wrote the KATSEYE entry, began with the argument the group walked into: the long-running question of what the ‘K’ in K-pop actually is had not been settled when they “appeared in the scene out of nowhere, as though such an argument were entirely useless to the case for their own existence”.

The same note sets out what makes the case unusual — most of the members are not Korean, the songs are all in English and the group is based in Los Angeles, yet it went through K-pop’s training and casting system exactly as it is — and sums the result up as “a new kind of hybrid, K-pop software with de-Koreanised hardware grafted onto it”. Mano closed the entry on what the stage settles: “Who knows whether, once you have experienced the magic they work on stage themselves, you might come to think the question was rather a useless one after all. What is called ‘star quality’ is precisely that.”

Numbers

SIS (Soft Is Strong), the mini album this song opens, reached the US Billboard 200. Marie Claire Korea reported that on the chart dated 31 August 2024, published on 27 August local time, the mini album entered at number 119, and that KATSEYE went to number one on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart.