Hootie Frutti

“Hootie Frutti” gets one thing unambiguously right: the beat. The title track off KATSEYE’s third EP, WILD — the HYBE x Geffen sextet’s first full project since 2024’s competition-show debut — is built on a Brazilian-phonk-inspired percussion line that’s genuinely aggressive and genuinely fun, the kind of low-end rattle that would carry a club set on its own without a single vocal on top of it. For about ten seconds at a time, it sounds like the most interesting thing KATSEYE has released.

Then the vocals arrive, and the song starts working against itself. Where the beat is disciplined and specific, the vocal arrangement is maximalist in the least productive sense — six voices stacked into a hook that keeps reaching for a bigger moment than the track actually needs, repetitive lyrics doing chant-along duty in place of an actual melodic idea. It’s not that any individual performer sounds bad; it’s that the song keeps handing the beat’s momentum over to a vocal take that has nothing as sharp to say. Strip the singing out entirely and what’s left — the phonk groove, the production, the sheer physical energy of it — would honestly be the better record.

The music video hasn’t helped the song’s case. Set at a fading underground Brazilian party that KATSEYE arrive to revive, it’s split fan reaction down the middle: plenty of praise for the group’s live-performance potential and playful energy, and just as much pushback on choreography and visuals read by a chunk of the audience as reaching for shock value the song itself hadn’t earned. That’s a fair description of the track underneath it, too — a lot of spectacle standing in for a song that, at its core, is one very good beat with too much stacked on top of it.

5.5/10 — KATSEYE clearly have the production instincts to make something this loud work. “Hootie Frutti” just proves they haven’t yet figured out what to do with their own voices once the beat’s already doing all the talking.