In Defence of 'Gnarly'

KATSEYE’s new single has divided the Internet, who’ve branded the lyrics ‘corny’ and ‘outdated’. They’re missing the point.

They could describe everything with one single word. Last year, the term of choice (and a contender for the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year) was ‘brat’. Fittingly so, too: not only was its associated Charli xcx album really quite excellent, but the word itself was full of dichotomies. The ‘brat’ in question was a persona, an aggressive façade complemented by a vulnerable and self-conscious inner self. Like all of us, the hypothetical character of brat contained multitudes, which meant that all of us were, in some way, brat. These numerous possible applications of ‘brat’ undoubtedly led to its widespread use. Reconnecting with an old friend to quash beef? That’s brat. Getting off your tits on six-pound wine? Also brat. Torn between motherhood and your career? A perennially female struggle that, now, falls under the ‘brat’ umbrella. The sly ingenuity of BRAT’s title, and the ensuing marketing, meant that soon enough we all had the word on our lips.

Allow me to propose the ‘brat’ of 2025: ‘gnarly’. Like ‘brat’ before it, the word has several meanings. We might associate it with the stereotype of a surfer dude, who uses ‘gnarly’ interchangeably with ‘sick’ or ‘righteous’ (read: general praise or endorsement). We might also, though, use it to describe something complicated, challenging, intimidating – ‘that weather looks gnarly’, for instance. At the risk of mansplaining, ‘gnarly’ is multifaceted; girl group KATSEYE’s eponymous new single – on paper, at least – seemed destined to catapult the term into mainstream use.

The track, released at the tailend of April, adheres to pop conventions while slyly upending them, too. There’s verses, choruses, space for a dance break, a hook engineered for the fans to chant to at the concert – and the whole thing clocks in at a playlist-friendly two minutes and seventeen seconds. The lyrics, too, appear boilerplate bubblegum pop: nonsense claims about how, like a bag of Takis (tortilla chips known for their spicy flavour), singer Manon is ‘the shit’.

Look deeper, though, and the song – aside from its satisfyingly stuttery, clangy production adjacent to the work of SOPHIE – cleverly explores the multitudinous interpretations of its title. ‘Boba tea’, for instance, is described as ‘gnarly’ – which could refer to how beloved it’s become in the Western world, both because it’s delicious but also because its Asian origins have, in the past, been appropriated by white businesspeople. Gnarly, right? The same logic is applied to ‘fried chicken’, which some may celebrate as a delicious comfort food, and others (like myself, a vegetarian) might condemn as a symbol of exploitation, speciesism and flagrant animal rights violations. A gnarly situation if ever I heard one.

The gnarliest of them all might be, as KATSEYE mention, car company Tesla. It’s one of the leading manufacturers of electric cars, generally considered better and more efficient than petrol cars. Yet it’s been accused of committing numerous environmental violations, has faced complaints regarding racism & sexual harassment, and is owned by a Trump sympathiser who – and I probably don’t need to tell you – performed a movement eerily similar to a Nazi salute in January. Gnarly!

KATSEYE in promotional artwork for ‘Gnarly’

The corny lyrics – which, I’ll admit, I initially dismissed as typical K-pop drivel – are a means to an end, subtly satirising consumerist culture as well as what many have dubbed ‘H&M music’; in one line, perhaps the best in the song, member Lara laments ‘making beats for a boring, dumb bitch’ – revealing both the lack of craftsmanship certain artists show when making said retail-friendly music, as well as the speed at which stan Twitter rips into other artists who pour immense amounts of care into a release, in the name of defending their fave. This practice is particularly prevalent on the K-pop corners of stan Twitter, where biases and idols are, well, idolised, while others are torn down at every opportunity. Beyoncé, for instance, might be called a ‘boring, dumb bitch’ by Billie Eilish fans – despite the former being widely considered the greatest living performer – all because they were up for the same award.

To my ear, though, the true beauty of the song (aside from the fact that it really, really slaps) is what the aforementioned meaning cumulatively has to say about where we’re at in society. ‘Gnarly’ means everything, but also nothing, celebrating a sort of cultural homogeneity where – in our hellscape times – we’re used to seeing untold atrocities unfold on our phones, and then dutifully go on with our day. To paraphrase Jia Tolentino in a recent essay, each day’s fresh horrors sit in the back of our minds and forms a new segment of the canvas onto which we project the events of our lives. Nothing feels real anymore; everything feels both useless and loaded with meaning. In the world of ‘Gnarly’ – which is to say, the selfsame world in which I write this piece and you read it – the car company owned by a neo-Nazi means the same thing as a fun drink from Taiwan.

Inadvertently, then, this girl-group song is a contender for The Song of our time, encapsulating our daily movement between chasms as well as our inexplicable ability to forget all of that and shake ass for a minute (though perhaps not quite as skilfully as KATSEYE have in live performances of ‘Gnarly’). After all, what use is pushing back against the end times when you’re already in its house and the walls are closing in? You might as well dance while you still have wiggle room. The subtle revelations of ‘Gnarly’ are painfully, startlingly human.

One would think that the above factors would have facilitated the ubiquity of both the track and its title in the mainstream, in the vein of ‘brat’ last year. Yet the Internet reacted harshly to ‘Gnarly’, branding it ‘cringe’ whilst not seeing that the cringiness was the point.

Single art for ‘Gnarly’

Where BRAT was – not to diminish its artistic value – a relatively accessible album, especially by Charli xcx standards, ‘Gnarly’ is abrasive, nonsensical, almost undetectably satirical. More complex than most girl-group fare, let alone most pop music, it should perhaps come as no surprise that the public haven’t taken kindly to ‘Gnarly’. Particularly in an age where social media, and the ten-to-fifteen second clips it’s built on, strip all art of nuance by taking it out of context, the various moments of ‘Gnarly’ (the challenging production, the way Yoonchae says ‘fried chicken’) seem random, even off-putting, when taken in isolation. Satire only works when it has context and consideration – two chief enemies of social media, which thrives on things being taken at face value and profits off the ensuing discourse.

It's why the reception of ‘Gnarly’ speaks to the perils of pop music discourse on social media. In fact, I was one such naysayer of the song on its release; I heard a snippet on TikTok, and was morbidly fascinated at how purely silly – dare I say, cringe – it was. I listened to it, then a second time, then a third, and slowly its cleverness began to reveal itself. The song was, in a way, satirising the desensitised Internet culture it was being torn apart by: compressing footage of a genocide and a pop concert into a single experience describes many a TikTok algorithm.

The unkind reception to ‘Gnarly’ smacks of elitism, too, one where (seemingly) simple lyrics – especially pop lyrics – are decried as artless. In particular, K-pop lyrics are known for being nonsensical, since lyrics are probably the last draw of K-pop (and understandably so, when there’s the dance routines, the biases/idols within the group, the physical media to fixate on). There’s an intriguing dimension to the conversation, too, when you consider that the primary lyricist of ‘Gnarly’ is Chinese-American writer Alice Longyu Gao. For someone whose first language isn’t English, Gao was enamoured by the word ‘gnarly’; as she tells it, she was ‘amused and surprised by the excessive usage of this word by some basic bros’. Branding the lyricism as ‘cringe’, and the term ‘gnarly’ as out-of-date, invites another, more sinister discourse, one where we exclude non-native English speakers for not using the language in the way we deem ‘correct’, despite English being both grammatically complicated and socially evolving. It’s something that the knee-jerk reaction to ‘Gnarly’ fails to consider.

Perhaps, in my vehement defence of ‘Gnarly’, I’ve dug myself a trench from which my voice is muted. Nonetheless, the song itself and the discourse it’s sparked are wildly fascinating. If nothing else, I hope you may listen to ‘Gnarly’ with fresh ears after reading this piece. I, too, hope that future releases in this vein – ones with nuance and complexity – aren’t similarly torn apart on social media as a symptom of the issue the song criticises. Then again, even BRAT had its naysayers. Maybe ‘Gnarly’ has potential yet to become our song of the summer.