Who are Katseye? And why did I let my daughter talk me into spending more than €400 on tickets for their show at 3Arena in Dublin?Oh, you got tickets. Well done. Judging by social media, you’re one of the few people in Ireland to successfully negotiate the Ticketmaster hellscape on Thursday, ahead of their Irish concert on September 1st.Only joking. I couldn’t get tickets. Ticketmaster froze me out, then refused to recognise my presale code. And when I did get in, the tickets were all gone. Even the ones costing – surely some mistake – €347.85 each. All that agony, and I still don’t know anything about them.It’s all part of the joy of having to tackle the ticketing behemoth. As for Katseye, they’re essentially a western attempt to create a K-pop band in the mould of BTS or Blackpink.How can you be K-pop if you’re not from Korea?K-pop isn’t just about geography. It means a certain sort of music that pinches ideas from all over. In the case of Katseye that means pop, funk, reggae and rap, mixed together and delivered in an in-your-face, upbeat style that’s very K-pop.So they’re pretending to be K-pop?Not quite. The band is a collaboration between Universal Music Group – the world’s biggest record company – and Hybe, the Seoul entertainment conglomerate that created BTS. And Katseye were formed along traditional K-pop lines. They came together in an X Factor-style reality show on YouTube called The Debut: Dream Academy. Twenty contestants were originally selected from 120,000 applicants, with the six winners announced live on YouTube in November 2023. Their story was then taken up in the Netflix show Pop Star Academy: Katseye. So every moment of their career has been publicly documented.In what other ways do they draw on the K-pop rulebook?In their interactions with fans. K-pop groups are expected to interact with their audience – and Katseye have done just that, whether hosting TikToks for fans or engaging them on Weverse, a community created by Hybe that allows fans – Katseye’s call themselves Eyekons – to directly message artists and talk to them on official forums.So all smooth sailing and no drama?Not quite. Katseye started as the six-piece of Daniela Avanzini, Lara Raj, Manon Bannerman, Megan Skiendiel, Sophia Laforteza and Yoonchae Jeung, but in February Bannerman said she was taking a “hiatus” to focus on her health and wellbeing. She has not yet returned. The Swiss singer, whose father is Ghanaian, had said she felt she was treated differently from the rest of the band because of her race, pointing to an incident on Dream Academy when she was accused of being lazy for missing rehearsals when she was in fact unwell. “Being called lazy, especially as a black girl, is not fair,” she said. “Now I feel like I always need to put in extra work to prove something, even though I really don’t.”What about their music? What are their albums like?They haven’t got around to recording an album yet, although a third EP, Wild, is scheduled for release in August, shortly before they kick off their Wildworld tour at 3Arena. That hasn’t hampered their popularity, however: in 2025 they accumulated more than 30 billion views on TikTok, and they have over 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify – about eight million more than U2.