"Haven't you heard? I'm the internet girl / It isn't my fault that it's always my turn," goes the chorus of "Internet Girl," a single by the Los Angeles girl group Katseye that dropped on the first business day of 2026. In the pop realm, achieving ubiquity is a poisoned chalice: Taking one's turn is an eternal flex, but maintaining that position can become a kind of curse, a reality that Katseye knows quite well. Since its 2024 launch, the group has held sway as an experiment gone right: the first successful attempt to repackage the star machinery of Seoul's booming talent agencies and franchise it abroad, rigorously replicating the optics and processes of K-pop, if not the sound. This was to be another auspicious year, with the group nominated for best new artist at the Grammys and booked to perform a prime-time Coachella set — but inner turmoil disrupted the planned victory lap. In February it was announced that Manon Bannerman, the Swiss, biracial group member who had long been a proxy for the crew's competitive pressures, would be taking a temporary hiatus to "focus on her health and wellbeing." Shortly thereafter, she removed "Katseye" from her Instagram bio. Us Weekly soon claimed she was not returning to the group, citing an anonymous source. And at the moment her groupmates took the stage for their Coachella debut in April, she did too — at the opposite end of the festival grounds, in a cameo appearance dancing behind PinkPantheress.
It's rare to see a pop star opt out of the game right as they're blowing up. But to anyone who followed Dream Academy, the televised contest that created Katseye and aired on Netflix as The Debut: Pop Star Academy, Manon's exit may be less of a surprise. Formed through a label collaboration between the K-pop company HYBE and American major Geffen, the Katseye project brought 20 young women from around the world to Los Angeles to compete for a spot in a new group, to be built using "K-pop methodology." Contestants lived together, were put through a rigorous training system with mini-group challenges, and were ranked individually and systematically based on performance. Manon was a late entry, an already Insta-famous influencer somewhat noncommittal about the rehearsal process, and was framed by the show as a disruptive presence. In one polarizing clip, Adéla, a Slovakian ballerina who was among the first eliminated, criticizes Manon's work ethic: "She doesn't put a lot of effort, and she doesn't show up for her team a lot," she said to some other contestants. "So people are upset that she is the person who is getting so much attention. It's not based on anything right now, it's just because she's pretty."
The underlying sentiment — that a million girls would kill for the job you aren't taking seriously enough — is one Manon has since highlighted as distinctly American, and she's swatted away the idea that living the dream should take precedence over one's own welfare. "America has a very different culture when it comes to work-life balance. You guys are all about grind and hustle," she told The Cut. "Being called lazy, especially as a Black girl, is not fair. Now I feel like I always need to put in extra work to prove something, even though I really don't." More than her own career, her stance seemed to reflect a revelation about the industry she'd been working to enter. Manon may or may not return to Katseye, but what may matter more for us as observers is the space she occupies along the modern performance matrix: a social star turned pop debutante via fan-voted reality competition, who seems to demonstrate a modern tension between the pop star as artist, as idol and as content creator.
Manon is one of a handful of LA transplants currently making sense of a changing Hollywood dream, one that straddles the old signifiers of fame and a new influencer economy. In fact, you could see HYBE's crash-landing in Santa Monica as symbolic of the transition from one phase to the other. We still celebrate a traditional idea of stardom as defined by Hollywood, one marked by a pilgrimage to the Pantages, but it has become an accepted truth that some simulation is now required to get there — miming the paces of celebrity, being an avatar for the front-facing camera. (It's an intersection capped by the TikTok mansion gold rush era, where creators set up collab houses in LA just to make content, a phenomenon that birthed the fame-obsessed dancer turned singer Addison Rae.) For most would-be artists, your life is a performance well before you even make it, and posting and being hyper-viewable are part of the induction process. This obligation extends beyond outright stars: As the singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb, who herself has sought to shed "TikTok" as a career signifier, put it in the Substack essay "Direct address," "My job is supposed to be reminding you that I exist, enough so that you might engage with my record (though any short-form content about the record has better metrics than the record itself), and of course I must beg for your attention, your precious time."
If being an artist is the work, being a pop star is the labor, to borrow a distinction defined by philosopher Hannah Arendt in the 1958 book The Human Condition — work being the purpose-fulfilling things we make to create and honor our human reality, and labor being the effort sustained to survive. Labor is equally important, but from an artistic standpoint, it can be disruptive to the nourishing process that is simply creating, especially when that labor is performative in a different sense. Begging for attention and time, as McLamb put it, is a pop practice that now includes everyone in creative fields to some extent; even those who don't necessarily aspire to reach the Top 40 must still compete. And because much of this competition happens online, it has created a weird, blurry interactive zone wherein artists must sell the self as part of the labor.
The liminal spaces between work and labor, attention and engagement, the inspiration and the artist and the fan, are the subject of HALO, a gripping album released earlier this month by the 26-year-old Kansas-raised singer Tiffany Day. Like most artists, Day has been performing on screens for much of her life. A video of her singing "Hallelujah" on a school trip went viral on Twitter in 2017, and after moving to Los Angeles for college, she started to seriously pursue music, releasing four EPs while at school and garnering a million subscribers on YouTube. In subsequent years, she has migrated from a more mood-lit, bedroom R&B sound to a maximalist hyperpop one, with her 2024 debut, Lover Tofu Fruit, functioning as an artistic playpen in which she crossed those realms. Last year, the singles "Pretty4U" and "American Girl" launched her fully defined vision: meta-textual self-diagnostics melding dubstep and late aughts electropop into buzzy, distorted jams glitching out from an information overload, as if she'd tried to 3D print a for-you page. Her blown-out sound has led some to call her a 2hollis biter, ironic given that both of the 2025 singles reintroducing her to the internet are about the overwhelming anxiety surrounding the performance of cool and the pursuit of individuality. Day, for her part, has been adamant about her raver bona fides, though she has also come just short of calling her latest shift a rebrand. Listening to HALO, though, "authenticity" is exactly what is being challenged.
Hyperpop is the music most aware of the friction between the pop industry and the online ecosystem, and it is the appropriate environment for Day's self-effacing assessments of profile and influence. "I'm tеrrified that I don't really know myself wеll / I get too influenced and in over my head, I can't tell / What's really me or really you, the lines are always a blur / I feel this pity deep inside me, I'm self conscious, it hurts," she sings on opener "Everything I Ever Wanted," in which materially realizing her dream forces her to face the reality that becoming more popular won't inherently instill self-worth and isn't necessarily a path to selfhood. "Copycat" echoes this sentiment, as she seeks to jack the style of someone with a more pronounced and admirable self-expression to subvert doing the work of figuring herself out. (In another ironic development, Day has recently been embroiled in a plagiarism scandal online.) Across the songs on HALO, the singer seems to experience several evolutionary processes at once: She is a Wichita girl now at home in Los Angeles, who has come into her own sound but is still working out what being an artist means, and her desire to be perceived as a tastemaker liking all the right things has produced an album that cleverly repackages styles long thought at least a little cringe — from future bass to Warped Tour punk to electroclash. Hyperpop also seems to mirror the blurring of the self with one's entire musical and social data cache. Her yearning to be recognized led her to the music that has made her most identifiable.
Slayyyter, the performing name of Catherine Grace Garner, is on the other end of a similar creative arc looking to come full circle. She emerged in the late 2010s as a microcelebrity on Twitter. In 2019, the clubby single "Mine" went viral on the platform, and she was quickly swept up into a sleaze-pop revival. A product of stan culture that self-identifies as "chronically online," she has become a poster child for a not-uncommon phenomenon: a niche star operating under big-tent pop expectations, which can consequently warp one's personal expectations. "Starf***er" — her last album, from 2023 — "had a lot of big pop songs that I thought were gonna hit. After that, I was kind of like, 'I'm gonna make one more album'," she told The Fader.
That album, WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, is being narrativized by the artist as an escape from the pop rat race back home, mining the touchstones of her iPod upbringing as she nears 30. "Of course I'm not the Hollywood girl. I'm like the trashy Missouri bar girl," Slayyyter told the Los Angeles Times. Songs like "I'm Actually Kinda Famous" and "What is it Like, To Be Liked?" are winks directly at the camera, gesturing at the way she interfaces with her persona and its perception, and the way that persona interfaces with her public. The separation between persona and artist is increasingly difficult to grasp, though. Slayyyter has described WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA as more true to herself — "The music is the core of my soul," she told People — but if this is the real her, who was she before? It has become a running cliche for pop artists to describe their newest music as Slayyyter does, the record of each ongoing cycle more personal than the last — even that feels like a key aspect of pop-star image maintenance. Fittingly, the "authentic self" is among the most fluid concepts in internet culture, where identities often become platform-native.
Right now, we live with a pervasive, almost willful cognitive dissonance that stardom should function as it always has. In several practical ways, it does not. Many stars now begin as influencers: super-visible, accessible, always on and always performing well before they hit the stage, in the hope that stardom will then liberate them from the grind of self-promotion. For many, the rude awakening of getting the deal is that an imagined transition out of influencer mode is not coming — that this is the job. The mental struggle of the modern pop artist is that they are seeing what the vibe is — how it is less deifying and more involved all at once — yet there remains an expectation to act as if the old way still exists.
There does seem to be a pop-star observer effect, whereby the artist's awareness of the viewer's presence begins to fundamentally change the music that is made. I say "viewer" and not "listener" because it is the act of being perceived, in an extramusical context, that is most significantly inciting the change. Versions of this phenomenon have always existed: It is, in some ways, the story of Justin Bieber's very meta Coachella performance, and it also predates the social internet (Britney experienced it, just as Mariah did, just as Michael did). But the current milieu comes with increased appetite and ergonomics. Some, like Sabrina Carpenter, seem to have adapted well; others, like Chappell Roan, are struggling. As the gap between public life and private life erodes and parasocial behavior rises, the demand is upped for pop artists to exist as programming to be queued up and accessed at our leisure, wound up for our entertainment like a music box.
During The Debut: Pop Star Academy, HYBE chairman Bang Si-Hyuk, the architect of BTS, revealed a key part of his process: He does not interact with K-pop idols before they debut, choosing to consume videos throughout the audition process virtually, because that is the primary medium by which potential stans will likely first encounter the music. "Most people become fans when they're watching content such as music videos or shows," he said. "Which is why I think that I should also watch trainees through the screens. Conveying the accurate on-screen experience is my priority." The extramusical has always been key to the upkeep of a sustainable pop career — but now that social video is the primary interactive layer, what was once supplement often now supersedes, dictating the relationship between the music and the audience.
Being captured and saved for likes and impressions is the new show business, one that thinks of pop artists as brand advocates and networkers as much as showpeople, and feels more surreal than ever. Katseye's music has often explicitly reckoned with this reality, the on-screen experience as a window into the tinseltown of the pop imagination. The premise for the song "Mean Girls" not only revolves around chatter and backlash drummed up by the star-search contest but functions as a direct response: "Yes, yes, this is why I hate the internet, yes," Manon sings, later adding, "I'm not bringing all this baggage home, no / I unpacked all of that years ago," lyrics clearly nodding to all her Dream Academy drama. Fandom, these days, is mostly about negotiating the cult of personality, which is why the strategically inflated hype around the band Geese has been branded a "psyop." These moves are being treated as not just duplicitous, but emotionally manipulative, because so many fans do not like the reminder that the "on-screen experience" is never 100% real, even though we often navigate it as such. The stars are more observable, but that doesn't mean they are any more tangible.
Maybe that's why I find HALO so heartening: It is performing a kind of public self-autopsy of the ego. It's one of my favorite albums of the year, one that feels like a capsule of what it's like to be a young person trying to make music right now; so much of the labor and the work is out in the open with Day, and that's part of the charm. In her interview with the Los Angeles Times, her manager revealed she worried she had "fallen off" after the more hyperpoppy 2025 singles alienated fans of her previous music, and was thinking about quitting. Correspondingly, this album is so honest about the paradox of wanting to both fit in and stand out. Instead of giving up, Day challenged herself to post on TikTok every day for a month. The algorithm rewarded her, and she got her deal. Now comes the hard part, perhaps, but the searching nature of creativity still seems to exist beyond the browser.
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