Written by Lucas Juan Alvarez
Katseye’s Gnarly is a terrible song by most artistic standards, if not all, but it is also a song that I think is defining—in that it is so stupid and outlandish—that it goes round the horseshoe of music quality and becomes brilliantly profound. When it was released in April 2025, it was initially met with disdain from fans, with the consensus being that the lyrics were jarringly repetitive with no meaning, and that the group suited their much softer image in their Touch and Debut eras.
The song eventually became a reluctant fan favourite, now one of Katseye’s most popular songs, with 596 million streams on Spotify, an Ice Spice remix, and a live performance at the 2026 Grammys.
Upon first listen, the lyrics of the song are absurd, as the six members trumpet how things like fried chicken and boba tea are “gnarly” with no elaboration. However, there might be remnants of complex political commentary within the lyrics of the song.
I have always found the word “gnarly” extremely fascinating; like “peak” or “cold” in colloquial contexts, it can be used in a versatile way, describing something as good or equally bad. Because it is semantically ambiguous, the listener must rely on the conversation’s context and the speaker’s tone to discern how it is being used.
One could argue global K-pop group Katseye have become the face of “gnarly”, replacing the previous 1970s California surfers and noughties skaters. In this way, they’ve hijacked the word’s modern cultural character.
Before the word’s time ripping waves and kickflipping, it first found use in the 17th century, where “gnarly” grew out of “gnarl”, meaning to twist or deform. The word describes what it means to go against a binary standard of what is well formed and what is not, arguably making it inherently political; it is no surprise that “gnarly” grew to be a popular term in the anglosphere’s countercultural facets. A symbol of how situations, objects, and individuals are intricate, complex and confusing.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), written in the shadow of Nazism and during a major turning point in Hollywood cinema, describes how mass media naturally lends itself towards the homogenisation of ideas, themes, and narratives. Similarly, Gnarly explores the linguistic possibility of being able to describe everything with “ one single word… ya know?”. The opening line of the song suggests that there is a possible linguistic reality where speech could be amassed into 5 letters.
The 1947 book comments on the harm Enlightenment theory did to Western society through its need to categorise and segment everything into scientific groups, building a false grounding for many future pseudoscientific racial fascist movements. Although the principle of adjustable and fluctuating definitions within language seems harmless and perhaps unrelated at first, without certainty in the language that we speak, we are doomed to have no language at all. Within his writings on Language Games, Wittgenstein attributes a lack of shared understanding in language, specifically the meaning of words, as the cause of all conflicts.
With the redefining of words, the application of Wittgenstein can be used top-down to define terms used in and by communities, which in turn construct other ideas like identity. Similar loose definitions were used in the Third Reich. The Nuremberg race laws—legislation that attempted to codify Jewish identity as biological fact in law—were inconsistent and fluctuated under the whim of party leadership’s demands. These laws had exemptions introduced in December 1938 to protect non-Jewish Germans in mixed marriages from the persecution directed at Jewish spouses. Additionally, persons with only two Jewish grandparents were often excluded from classification as Jews in the 1930s, revealing that the racial boundary the laws sought to fix was in practice arbitrary and contested.
The way Katseye uses the term “gnarly” in their song then becomes indicative of everything that Enlightenment theory in application leads to: being the logical endpoint of fascistic homogenising tendency, as distinction is eliminated into a universal signifier capable of describing virtually anything at the whim of who is using the word.
When I talked this through with a friend over a pint, he offered a more hopeful reading. For him, Gnarly was not language collapsing into a single sign but language doing what it has always done, shifting to take on new cultural roles. A word that began as a description of the twisted and malformed, and that has since been claimed by surfers, skaters and now a global K-pop group, resists the rigid rule that “x definitively means x.” The song then does not enact the Enlightenment’s urge to categorise and actually dismantles it. Either way, it’s a lot of pressure to place on a song about fried chicken. Perhaps the difference lies in who holds the power: a word that drifts through communities is playful, but a word whose meaning is dictated from above is often more sinister.
