Blackpink review – K-pop queens bring fun to New York with a little fatigue on the side

The Guardian

4 days ago

In 2023, the four women of Blackpink – Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé – stood on top of the world. In the seven years since their 2016 debut, the K-pop quartet became the biggest girl group of all time, off the back of delirious hooks, hard-ass stunting, cut-glass choreography and relentless work. With billions of streams, sold-out stadiums and YouTube viewership records in their wake, the group became the female face of the boundary-annihilating force that is K-pop, taking pandemonium and hype as its calling card; with the exception of their slender physiques, everything about the band was huge. Their 2023 headliner set at Coachella – the first Asian and all-female group to headline one of North America's largest music festivals – served as a jet-fueled exclamation point on global domination. I stood in the crowd that night feeling like I'd been leveled by a sonic boom, in the best way.
Much has changed in the two short years since then. The band went on unofficial hiatus for each member's respective solo careers, and the four subsequent releases – Jennie's Ruby, Jisoo's Amortage, Lisa's Alter Ego and Rosé's Rosie – all attempted to escape the Blackpink shadow with halting success; the group's two rappers, Lisa and Jennie, also launched English-language acting careers on HBO, in The White Lotus and The Idol, and returned to Coachella as solo acts with plenty of bombast but less horsepower. The once ascendant wave of K-pop, buoyed up by the massive crossover success of Blackpink and all-male peers BTS, stalled out abroad and lost traction at home, global ambition and misfiring albums costing musical identity and momentum.
The pop banger remains, however, a universal, enduring language, and at New York's Citi Field on Sunday night, Blackpink flexed their mastery of the genre with a tour of their energy drink-style hits – unabashedly manufactured, relentlessly upbeat, the highs jagged, aggressive and borderline hallucinatory. Just two years after their last world tour, Blackpink is back for what is billed as a reunion, with the band in a precarious if still victorious position; the last North American stop of their Deadline World Tour (is the deadline age? Solo success? Fleeting consumer attention?), at a stadium in one of the largest Asian American communities in the US, is an undeniable celebration, a spectacular if familiar show of force.
It's also evidence of the wandering focus of a band now comfortably at the top; despite the alleged urgency of the deadline, the 2.5-hour show is more slack than Blackpink standard, the girls still stunting but no longer out for the kill. (With the exception of Lisa, the group's hardest member by far, who remains lethal, her dancing never less than crisp.) Numerous times during the group's typically maximalist set – three acts and an encore, spliced with two-to-three-song solo diversions for each member – I caught the look of fatigue on their faces. A drop of the elbow here or a slip of the mean mug there, though quickly smothered by the pyrotechnics, army of industrial backup dancers, lasers, general swirl of stadium sound and camera work that largely denied the pleasure of seeing all four in formation, in favor of one or two singers at a time.
And fair enough – the New York July night was so oppressively humid that I was dripping in sweat just standing there; after the head-banging bombast of Boombayah, all four were forced to acknowledge the air's palpable resistance to any movement, or as de facto spokesperson Rosé put it: 'It is REALLY hot today.' The goodwill of faithful Blinks – fittingly for the band, a stadium of many languages, diehard adults next to awed children with merch-toting parents in tow – largely covered for any lapses, and was rewarded with high-octane delights. New single Jump, making the girl power lineage explicit – 'So come up with me, I'll take you high / That prima donna, spice up your life' – layered itchy club beat, weapons-grade bass and tweaking choreography with lasers, fireworks and smoke for a full dose of undiluted, undeniable hype that got the crowd up. At their best, the siren call of 'Blackpink in your areaaaaaa' remains as potent as ever.
Less so with the solo diversions, each introduced with interludes of overdone music video imagery of the luxe life – Vegas and city lights, diamonds and furs – that underscored their relative lack of precision. Jennie delivered obligatory stunting, Jisoo sensible pop, Rosé surprising ballads – her solo section, in which she went full Taylor Swift mode with the guitar, provided the most western-style pop moments of the show. If the solo sections hammered home one impression, it's that Lisa alone, in her dragon-skin suit and formidable sneer, has the jet fuel for a solo career. Also, that as a unit, the members' combined strengths covered their weaknesses like an airtight shield.
It was a palpable relief, then, when they reunited following Rosé's turn for the pure force of breakout track DDU-DU DDU-DU, the wattage re-upped by camaraderie and their view of the finish line. Individually, they are pop artists in a crowded field, each neutralized and overwhelmed by the familiar elements around them. Together, they steamroll. And so it was that Sunday's finale of Like Jennie, in which all four came together to perform a song that Jennie just performed solo, briefly showed the stamp of Blackpink magic: the beat rips, the head-bopping with slick glasses is distinctly Jennie, but nothing hits quite like the four of them moving together.