Hours before KATSEYE’s headline set at Head in the Clouds, leader Sophia Laforteza stepped back to protect her mental health — the group’s second member hiatus since February, and its third HxG-branded departure story this year.
On August 7, hours ahead of KATSEYE’s headlining set at the Head in the Clouds Music and Arts Festival, HYBE and Geffen announced that leader Sophia Laforteza would be taking a “temporary hiatus” to prioritize her mental health. It’s the second time in six months a KATSEYE member has stepped back this way — Manon Bannerman began her own hiatus in February and hasn’t returned. KATSEYE, formed as a six-member group through the Netflix docuseries Dream Academy, is now touring, recording, and releasing music as four.
Sophia’s hiatus didn’t come out of nowhere. In a Weverse livestream in May, she’d already told fans she’d been diagnosed with ADHD around the time KATSEYE debuted in 2024, describing ongoing struggles with restlessness, difficulty focusing, and sleep — and naming, specifically, that she sees a psychiatrist, a psychologist, and a therapist. Weeks before the hiatus announcement, on a podcast appearance that went viral, she pushed back forcefully against online criticism of the group, telling detractors, in her own words, that “the internet is not everything.” A BBC interview months earlier had the group discussing receiving what Sophia described as thousands of death threats — a volume of hostility she said “no human is supposed to receive.”
Her hiatus statement, posted to Instagram, described it as genuinely painful to have to miss upcoming performances. The timing forced KATSEYE to perform its Head in the Clouds headline set as a quartet the very next day, and Sophia will also miss the group’s slot at Olivia Rodrigo’s new Daisy Chain Fields festival later this month — all of it landing exactly one week before the group’s Wild EP arrives on August 14.
Manon’s hiatus, announced in February, was framed in almost identical language: a joint HYBE/Geffen statement citing “health and wellbeing,” reached through “open and thoughtful conversations.” Six months later, she still hasn’t returned, and the door being “always open” hasn’t produced a timeline. In a February interview with The Cut, published just before her hiatus, Manon offered the closest thing to an on-record structural critique either member has given — criticizing what she described as an American work culture that pressures people to keep working even while sick.
The story took a strange turn on August 4, when Variety’s “Young Hollywood Impact Report” described KATSEYE’s achievements using language that read, to many fans, as a flat confirmation that Manon had permanently left the group — despite no such confirmation ever coming from HYBE, Geffen, or Manon herself. Fans pushed back hard, noting the same Variety piece contained a separate factual error about Manon’s Grammy nomination status, undermining confidence in the claim. As of this writing, KATSEYE’s own channels have never described Manon’s status as anything other than an ongoing, undated hiatus.
Reading the Pattern
It would be irresponsible to treat two individual health situations as proof of a single cause — people experience unrelated health crises, and both members have been candid that their circumstances are personal and specific. But it’s also worth naming plainly what KATSEYE’s schedule has actually looked like since its 2024 debut: a televised casting show, a docuseries, two Grammy nominations, a Coachella slot, American Music Awards wins, a constant EP and single release cycle, and a level of online scrutiny intense enough that members have publicly described receiving death threats. That’s an extraordinary amount of pressure to sustain continuously for a group that’s not yet two full years past its first release.
- The individual read: two members, two different disclosed conditions, two different timelines — treating this as one story risks flattening real, separate experiences into a single narrative neither woman has claimed for herself.
- The structural read: a six-person group debuted through reality television, kept at a near-constant global promotional pace, exposed to a volume of public hostility significant enough to require its own media training, is now missing a third of its lineup to mental health hiatuses within the same calendar year. Whatever the individual causes, the operational tempo around them hasn’t changed in response to either departure.
Both readings can be true. What’s not really in dispute is that this is the third time this year KpopWave has covered an HxG-branded act pausing or losing a member under nearly identical “wellbeing” language — after Manon in February and SAINT SATINE’s Lexie Levin in July. A pattern doesn’t need a single villain to be worth naming.
I want to be careful here, because the easiest version of this piece would turn two young women’s disclosed health struggles into ammunition for an industry takedown, and that’s not a trade I think is fair to either of them. Sophia and Manon each told their own stories, in their own words, on their own timeline. That deserves respect, not narration.
What I think is fair to say plainly: a group built this fast, scrutinized this intensely, and kept on this continuous a promotional cycle was always going to test its members’ limits eventually, and it’s now tested two of them within the same year. Nobody at HxG designed this outcome on purpose. But two hiatuses in six months, described in nearly identical corporate language, is a pattern the label has more power to address than either member does — and “the door is always open” isn’t the same thing as building a pace that doesn’t require walking through it in the first place.
— KpopWave Editorial
Reporting cross-verified across Forbes, the BBC, Yahoo Entertainment/UK, Gulf News, PEOPLE, Deadline, E! News, Just Jared, Philstar, and Inquirer.net coverage (Feb–Aug 2026). All health-related details reflect information the members themselves chose to disclose publicly; KpopWave has not sought or speculated on additional medical information beyond what’s on the record. This is a sensitive topic — if you’re personally navigating mental health challenges, please consider reaching out to a counselor, doctor, or a crisis line in your area.