The soaring hook of "Golden," the standout single from Netflix's megahit KPop Demon Hunters, has gone up, up, up like a call to arms for an industry's slumbering giants, ushering them out of dormancy. The animated film, which scored the first-ever K-pop win at the Grammys this year and is favored at the Academy Awards, signaled a never-before-seen mainstreaming of K-pop in the American zeitgeist: This is their moment, and the pioneering groups of Western expansion now reenter on those terms. Later this month, the gateway-opening crew BTS will return for Arirang, its first album in six years. But that comeback follows a different kind of reunion: that of the boy band's contemporary, Blackpink. While BTS was forced apart by its nation's mandatory military service, the members of Blackpink — Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé — went on hiatus willingly, in pursuit of solo stardom. Individual results varied, but the experiment was a collective success. Now comes the harder part: keeping the group in sync.
Those efforts begin with the EP (or mini-album) DEADLINE, which isn't selling the next frontier so much as business as usual. The Blackpink signature has long been chaotic maximalism, channeling sneering alpha-dog boldness into uplifting go-girl camaraderie and teamwork. (The irony being that pop stardom, especially K-pop stardom, has so often been characterized by a lack of agency, and the members' individual moves beyond the group could be viewed through the lens of a reclaimed autonomy.) The power of pretty privilege, of a baddie and her baddie friends to command attention, is not just the subtext of the group but of idol groups more broadly; they thrive on collectivity, and this moment wants to be about that harnessed energy, particularly the accumulated wattage of going your separate ways and doing some self-actualizing before coming back stronger. It's a familiar and satisfying narrative when pulled off, and in the run-up to DEADLINE's release, the group's label, YG Entertainment, emphasized "both the individual musical capabilities of the four members and their synergy as a team." Yet while things appear fine on the surface, leaning back into routine has underscored a disrupted rhythm. DEADLINE feels like high school friends reuniting for the first time after going off to separate colleges; pretend though they might, things have clearly changed.
The group members have long been adherents of a K-pop concept known as "girl crush," a vaguely defined aesthetic classification focused on female empowerment. In their hands, it has been distinguished by displays of self-confidence as acts of insubordinate girlbossery: "We some b****es you can't manage," Jennie sang on "Pretty Savage." On DEADLINE, those themes are finessed into a kind of meta-commentary on group unity, where standing together is a sign of not just sisterhood but cooperation: "My whole crew with me, if I go, then they go too," Jennie raps on "GO." "Pull up, four in a sprinter / We eat losers for dinner / Hit hard, hard like a heart attack / Same team, girl, yeah, I got your back," Lisa adds on "Champion." The allied front is the entire premise of "Me and My," a snappy, brassy salvo that treats ladies' night as a kind of glamour procession. The song works, but this coalition mindset isn't quite reflected by the music's creative economy. Spinning off into independent operations, and toward the Western event horizon, has shifted the group off its axis.
The last Blackpink project, the 2022 album BORN PINK, was baldly bilingual in a way that hinted at expanding ambitions, but even that album had a sense of balance between its conqueror's aspirations and its obligations to home base. Four of the five songs on DEADLINE are completely in English; maybe about 15% of the single "Jump" is in Korean. That wouldn't be an issue if the recalibration weren't also altering the group's equilibrium. Almost all of the verses are rapped, meaning Jennie and Lisa chew up most of the scenery. Jisoo, who speaks the least English, is largely in the margins. Rosé, who boasts the most solo commercial success, for music that sounds the least like anything made within the shared confines of the group, kind of seems like she can't really be bothered. Blackpink always put a greater emphasis on rap lyrics than its girl-group contemporaries, but the game-changing Blackpink songs had a noticeable symmetry. "Kill This Love" and "How You Like That" were much more intentional about their subdivision. Even BORN PINK's "Typa Girl" blurred the lines between roles, asking all the members to successively trade off lines that collectively straddle a dissolved rap-sung binary. That sense of internal management is missing from DEADLINE, even as it mimes house style.
The return to the ways of the past also demonstrates how much has changed in the world of K-pop since the group separated. Some of that is evident from the credits — Kpop Demon Hunters star Ejae is a co-writer, as is Coldplay's Chris Martin, and Diplo and Dr. Luke join group architect and Demon Hunters producer Teddy behind the boards — but the music itself also feels a bit clunky compared to that of modern groups. At least some of Blackpink's problem now is that it was too influential, and its success has bred new prototypes that eclipse the original model. When it debuted, the group was innovative in its approach, treating rap-swirled EDM and weepy pop-rock as yin and yang in a two-sided, if not wholly integrated, Miss Universe fantasy. These days, they can't match the upstarts for efficiency: their Black Label sister group, MEOVV, has brought greater symbiosis to the two wolves of the inner it girl with songs that feel less jarring; the next-gen foursome aespa is more stylized in its sense of machine-powered electro dysfunction; and they don't rap as fluidly as the spitfires of the K-pop-emulating Japanese crew XG, which is less interested in sass than swank. No Blackpink song has ever flitted between rap and sung segments quite as effortlessly as "GALA" does.
It feels a bit like Blackpink is simply a K-pop institution at this stage, that the brand is more about the blazed trail than the group's current function. To wit: Blackpink unveiled DEADLINE at the National Museum of Korea in partnership with Spotify, a listening experience set up along the lobby's "Path of History." The music was previewed in the museum's atrium, the building's exterior and parts of its interior were bathed in pink light, and the members recorded multilingual guides for some of its artifacts. "By placing the group's music inside a space dedicated to preservation, the collaboration reads as more than just a crossover," Pyo Kyung-min wrote of the event in The Korea Times. "BLACKPINK subtly positions K-pop within the historical and cultural timeline, framing the album release as a statement about legacy and longevity." But Blackpink is anything but subtle, and while the move does blatantly position the group in its Korean context, the music it is built around doesn't have much to offer on legacy or culture. Instead, DEADLINE submits an homage to a preexisting group identity that is starting to slip away. Just like turning a museum pink, it's largely a symbolic gesture.
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