The ladies of Blackpink are feeling themselves laborious on Deadline, and it fits them. It’s the K-pop queens’ first new music in [blows dust off the calendar] greater than three years, since their career-capping 2022 album, the wonderful Born Pink. All 4 — Jennie, Rosé, Lisa, and Jisoo — have stored busy since then, getting severe about their solo careers. Rosé dropped her private assertion Rosie, with the smash “Apt.,” with Bruno Mars, which she simply carried out to kick off the Grammys a couple of weeks in the past. We’ve additionally gotten Lisa’s Alter Ego, that includes “Rockstar” (among the best hits ever with this title) and “New Woman” (ditto). Last 12 months additionally noticed Jennie’s Ruby and Jisoo’s Amortage.
But let’s face it — the world has been fiending for extra of the magic that Blackpink can solely make after they put their 4 heads collectively and let it rip. Deadline is a modest 15-minute EP, that includes their 2025 single “Jump,” launched six months in the past, and 4 new songs, three of them nice. The finest information about Deadline is that it doesn’t have a single woe-is-me sob ballad, an enormous reduction, since that’s the very last thing anybody wants from the group at this level. The Blackpink women are within the temper to stunt, at all times what they’re finest at, oozing glam charisma. Their particular person solo successes have clearly fired up their diva perspective — not that they’ve ever been needy in that division. On Deadline, Blackpink combine up the powerful and the coquettish in their very own unmistakable model.
It’s a curiously titled comeback, contemplating it took practically 4 years, and additionally contemplating it’s named for his or her 2025 Deadline World Tour, which already resulted in January. (It raises the query of what precisely the title means to them.) “Jump” kicks it off, a Top 40 hit from final July, a Diplo jam that mixes 2000s MTV-pop nostalgia with spaghetti-Western whistles, EDM breakdowns, and Eurocheese horn blurts, plus a salute to their girl-power godmamas within the Spice Girls.
“Go” is a splashier, extra aggressive occasion banger, produced by Cirkut and Teddy — surprisingly, the primary music that each one 4 members of Blackpink have co-written collectively, after a decade within the recreation. Even weirder, it’s received a writing credit score for Coldplay’s Chris Martin. It’s a fast-paced jumble of hardstep drops and “Black! Pink!” chants, whereas Lisa warns, “No slow jams/Bumping through the speakers when I do my go-go dance!” There’s a bridge that’s shut (actually shut) to the one in “Apt.” But there’s additionally an sudden Springsteen shout-out, when the beat slows down and Jennie sings, “When your heart is broken, baby/Darkness on the edge of toooown.” It’s a rousing second the place Born Pink meets Born to Run, from deep within the emotional badlands.
“Me and My” is one in every of their lure tributes, letting suckers know that you just higher be careful and disguise your man when Blackpink roll as much as the membership. Jennie boasts about “pretty privilege,” in her “hottie season,” and raps, “You know that’s my girl when I call her bitch.” Lisa buys out the bar and endorses some questionable NBA etiquette. (“Courtside on the call, we can touch the ball” — wow, possibly not?) Musically it’s undoubtedly same-old, however Jennie will get in one of many album’s wittiest trend traces, declaring, “Daisy Dukes make me speak my mind.”
“Champion” is the largest musical change-up on Deadline — and the strongest tune by a mile. They take a trip into Eighties new wave synth-pop, a frequent candy spot for them, from the Blondie strikes of “Yeah Yeah Yeah” to Rosé’s Toni Basil “Mickey” tribute on “Apt.” But “Champion” is a visit into big-hair goth-club darkwave atmosphere, rocking with closely flanged guitar that comes straight from the Cure circa Seventeen Seconds or Siouxsie and the Banshees circa Juju, sufficient to carry you spellbound. For these 4 imaginary women, this sort of slithery dance sound completely flatters their dynamic voices — it makes you would like they’d go for a complete album in new wave mode. (If they ever really feel like attempting a complete album once more, that’s. Hell, they might even do a full-on duet with the Cure, since Robert Smith takes deadlines as critically as they do.)
Blackpink have a long-running weak point for the acoustic-guitar ballads, at all times divisive for listeners, however they do it proper this time with “Fxxxboy.” It’s a unfastened, frisky, all-attitude ode to torturing exes by having meaningless intercourse with them, however refusing to nurture them emotionally, as a result of they’ve burned you too many instances and now it’s their flip to undergo. “Keep your expectations under the pavement,” Jisoo warns. “Guess karma’s a bitch/How’s it feel? Now I’m the fuckboy!” It may evoke “Tally” from Born Pink, one other second the place they grind their eight stiletto heels into an ex’s coronary heart. (As Jennie sang on that one, “I like to play dirty just like all of the fuckboys do.”) But it’s even meaner and wittier. “I don’t like you, I’m just bored” — rattling, Jisoo, that’s telling it straight. Blackpink have undoubtedly taken a protracted highway to evolve from “Lovesick Girls” to a four-woman squad of self-proclaimed fuckboys. But Deadline leaves you prepared for extra.
