Michael Schneider Variety Editor at Large SPOILER ALERT: Do not read ahead if you have not watched the Season 9, episode 13 of “The Masked Singer,” which aired May 11 on Fox. Pentatonix is pretty easy to recognize, as perhaps the best-known a cappella group performing today. So from the start, it was pretty easy to tell it was them on “The Masked Singer” – and indeed, the five-person group was unmasked as California Roll on Thursday’s show, which also doubled as the Season 9 semifinals. For their first song, “Paparazzi,” group member Scott Hoying said they tried to avoid doing any harmonies at first, “so we could hide the iconic Pentatonix harmony sound for at least a minute. For the first minute, I was trying to really change my voice. But it didn’t work, because every comment on every video was like, ‘I knew from the beginning it was Pentatonix and I was confirmed as soon as they all came in. We know that sound so much.’ But it honestly it was a compliment. It was very flattering to know that we can’t even hide our voice because it’s become part of what people have heard so many years.”
