Lara Raj finally got her name in the credits

EYEKONS had spent two years asking KATSEYE for a song written by one of the members. Lara Raj handed one over in July, then had to tell everyone it only comes with a Target receipt.

"Unloveu" is her first official songwriting and production credit on a KATSEYE release. It arrived on the biggest commercial week the group has ever had.

Wild opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 dated Aug. 29, and 145,000 of those 170,000 units came from people buying a physical copy. Our chart breakdown has the variant math and the taxonomy fight. Her name is the part of that week nobody assigned her.

The Dallas kid who won her way to New York

Lara Rajagopalan was born November 3, 2005, in Connecticut, to an Indian Tamil mother and a Sri Lankan Hill Country Tamil father. Her mother, Kavita, teaches Bharatnatyam.

She started performing at five, in Dallas, where she took vocal lessons and worked with the artist development company Septien Entertainment Group at House of Blues and Hard Rock Cafe stages. Winning a local singing competition got her into Septien's professional program, and that got her to New York.

New York was middle school at Professional Performing Arts School, then LaGuardia High as a drama major. In between she booked a 2018 episode of The Blacklist, commercials for Macy's and Spotify, and a principal role in the launch video for Michelle Obama's Global Girls Alliance.

So there was roughly a decade of auditions behind her before HYBE x Geffen ever clicked on a cover video. The survival-show edit tends to flatten that part.

Her older sister Rhea is a singer-songwriter, and the two of them taught each other to produce. Lara has described writing something every night, even when it stayed rough, to keep the muscle working.

She placed second on The Debut: Dream Academy in November 2023, briefly held the leader title before handing it to Sophia Laforteza, and talked the group out of spelling itself Catseye. She is also the first Indian-origin artist signed to a HYBE label.

Vogue India called her the desi pop baddie people had been waiting for. Her own version is shorter. "I wear my culture proudly," she told the magazine. "It's never muted."

The song EYEKONS kept asking for

She announced it herself, in a video message in late July: a bonus track she wrote and produced with Amy Allen and Ross Golan.

Allen has written for Sabrina Carpenter, Harry Styles, and Justin Bieber. Golan has worked with Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Maroon 5. For a first credit, that is a serious room to hold your own in.

The catch is where the song lives. "Unloveu" runs 3:53 on Target CDs and vinyl and is not on the five-track streaming edition, which is why the loudest reply under the announcement was some version of please put this on Spotify.

On Nicky at Night, the group's first long-form podcast interview, she named her references: Camila Cabello's "Never Be the Same" and Fifth Harmony's "Miss Movin' On."

"I loved and will always love Fifth Harmony, their ballads were insane, they shaped my life," she said. "I wanted to write a song that people could grow with."

A 20-year-old writing toward the girl group that raised her, from inside the girl group she is now in. It tracks that EYEKONS took this one personally.

Four members carrying it

Sophia stepped back Aug. 7 for mental-health care, a week before the EP arrived. Manon Bannerman has been out since February, and HYBE x Geffen have said Sophia gets reassessed in September.

That leaves Lara, Daniela Avanzini, Megan Skiendiel, and Yoonchae Jeung doing The Tonight Show, the Citi Concert Series on TODAY, and the opening night of a sold-out Wildworld tour on Sept. 1 in Dublin.

Which makes the rollout slightly odd to watch. WILD HEARTS sells the six of them as the product, and two are not in the room for the victory lap.

Ji-young Yoo turned an animated voice role into a live-action Paramount lead. Lara's version of that jump happens inside the group: cover kid to credited writer, on the week the machine printed its first No. 1.

Our read

"Unloveu" is the receipt worth keeping from this week. It says she can sit with two of pop's most booked songwriters and come out holding the song fans latch onto.

What we want to see is a member co-write on a streaming edition rather than a store exclusive. EYEKONS have been loud about wanting this one on DSPs, and they will get louder if she writes another.

Our take: she is the member to watch on this four-piece run, and the tour is the window. A second credit before Wildworld wraps would turn a Target bonus into a job description.