One release per year was once standard in K-pop, when there were fewer groups fighting for a share of a small domestic market. These milestones came via a fandom that had grown rapidly since late 2016, but who had to wait eight months for 2017’s single As If It’s Your Last, then an entire year for its follow-up Square Up. The four-track EP, Square Up, would go platinum in South Korea, DDDD would reach gold in the US, becoming their first billion-view video, and Kill This Love would make them the first-ever Korean girl group to enter the UK singles chart. Success lay in the catchy titular refrain, the memorable finger-gun dance and a gloriously excessive video, but also in Blackpink themselves as aspirational but emulatable, aesthetically fierce but not intimidating, killer on stage but adorable off it. Nineteen-year-old Ally (not her real name), a Singaporean who runs a sizeable fan account on Twitter calls DDDD “their total breakthrough”. On Blackpink’s 2018 Ddu-du-ddu-du ( DDDD for short) all these elements aligned to produce an irresistible pop package. YG is renowned for maximalist visuals and a heavy, club-friendly sound devised by in-house writer/producer Teddy Park-the man behind some of K-pop’s biggest, hookiest hits. The longstanding vision of K-pop as a blinged-out, ultra-slick fantasy world was created by three labels-YG Entertainment, JYP Entertainment and SM Entertainment. Their debut, Square One, was an overnight smash, the insistent build of Whistle and cocky chorus on Boombayah making for a short but thrilling introduction. There were big shoes to fill the beloved, trailblazing four-member girl group 2NE1 were over and Blackpink were expected to revive the bold EDM pop sound they’d embodied. How on earth did they do it? New-gen girl bandĪs the first girl group in seven years out of YG Entertainment (home to K-pop legends BIGBANG, 2NE1 and formerly, Psy), excitement prior to Blackpink’s August 2016 debut had built to fever pitch. And all this with just a handful of songs in their repertoire. They’re front-row fixtures at runway shows and the faces of mega brands including Chanel, Puma, Louis Vuitton and Dior. That same year they also undertook the most financially successful concert tour by a Korean female group. In 2019, they broke three Guinness World Records with the single Kill This Love, which has had more than 312m plays on Spotify and over 824m YouTube views-a mere fraction of the quartet’s billions of streams, downloads, views and followers.
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