If BTS, the world’s biggest boy band, are slowing things down to focus on solo projects, then the world’s biggest girl band, fellow K-Pop giants Blackpink, are only striding onwards.
The four-piece group — made up of members Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé, and Lisa — have all but cemented the success of this, their second studio album, before it’s even been released. It raced past two-million pre-orders last month, with studio bosses at YG Entertainment expecting to have hit three million by today (by comparison, Ed Sheeran’s last album sold 1.29m copies globally).
Blackpink will follow it up with the largest world tour ever embarked upon by a female K-Pop group, including two nights at London’s biggest arena, The O2, this winter. They sold out Wembley Arena when they played there back in 2019, with pre-sale tickets disappearing in just three minutes. Expect similar levels of hysteria when this upcoming batch goes on sale.
With the commercial side of things nicely wrapped up, it almost feels as though it doesn’t matter whether the music is any good or not. But as it turns out: it’s fine. As revolutionary as K-Pop has been from an industry standpoint — wresting power from the previously untouchable Western powerhouses — its music has been more about melding existing genres rather than forging something original.
And so it continues with Born Pink. American hip-hop, as ever, leaves a heavy footprint, from the whip-cracking boom-bap beats of album opener Pink Venom to the squeaky, thumping Typa Girl. Still, something familiar does rear its head. Much has been made in the past of K-Pop’s apparent difficulty in distinguishing between inspiration and appropriation when it comes to incorporating elements of black American culture into its music, and judging by some of the accents used when the members rap in English, there’s still some way to go.
Elsewhere, there’s the inevitable Eighties-style banger, Yeah Yeah Yeah (the music world’s obsession with that decade is in interminable health), a shimmery, Love Island soundtrack-ready slice of house-pop on Ready For Love, and some weepy piano ballads on The Happiest Girl, which feels squarely aimed at soliciting smartphone torch-waving singalongs at those arena shows.
With only eight songs on the tracklist, it’s refreshingly concise. But with the lack of invention on display, eight songs is probably quite enough.
