BLACKPINK - Deadline

In a landscape like k-pop, which lifts you up one day and drops you the next, finding a girl group that lasts more than five years (anyone say NewJeans?) is a sheer miracle. Reaching ten is an aberration of the system that only those who've genuinely carried outsized weight can boast about. Twice, Red Velvet, and now BLACKPINK: unlike their male counterparts, who even without enjoying who-knows-what level of success often manage to build solid careers (military service breaks included), the hope of achieving top-tier results narrows considerably for the girls. Not that the ten years of activity racked up by YG's flagship quartet came without controversy: amid endless contract disputes and negotiations of every kind, the suspicion that the foursome's adventure might be reaching its end wasn't so far-fetched. Add to that the worldwide solo breakthroughs of Jennie, Lisa and especially Rosé (with her "APT." becoming a global phenomenon), and you wouldn't be risking much by assuming there were no new chapters left to add after "Born Pink". Fast-forward to 2026, and following a triumphant world tour, "Deadline" arrives trying to place the girl group back into the contemporary pop conversation.

Trying being the key word: after the girl-crush concept developed for them was picked up and recycled endlessly by the k-pop industry for three-quarters of the girl groups that followed, it's genuinely hard to grasp what a release like "Deadline" is aiming to achieve. It's clearly not being talked about as a business opportunity, that much is a given, but on the artistic side all the weaknesses of a project that has completely lost its grip on the present come to the surface, as it tries to coast on the legacy card. With such a slim catalogue, and with so many groups having learned the lesson by heart (and even improved on it, see LE SSERAFIM), the game stops being fun from the very first moves. Take the title track, a "Jump" that wants to recall the quartet's most explosive moments but ends up coming across as a muddled amalgam of trance ideas, techno-ish stabs and drill interludes: if a track like this could still claim some freshness back in 2020, six years later it's just a confused pastiche that pales next to the far more forward-looking productions of NMIXX and similar acts.

Elsewhere, it's the sheer thinness of the material that stands out: over an old-school loop repeated ad nauseam, "Me And My" offers nothing more than tired declarations of friendship and wild nights out.

If the pseudo-industrial touch of "Go" could have served as a stylistic turning point for the whole project, it takes nothing at all for every ounce of potential to be dispersed and dragged down to the lowest common denominator: so the Artemas-style à-la post-punk openings of "Champion" get watered down into an over-emphatic chorus that squanders all the bubbling energy of the basslines, while the closing "Fxxxboy" does nothing to avoid slipping into the obligatory "reflective" moment, all acoustic touches and generic lyrical j'accuse.

However you look at it, this "Deadline" feels more like a last shot before the cartridge runs completely dry, the sound of a group that burned out in just ten years without ever really having the substantial body of work to justify it. There's plenty to be said about the increasingly voracious, planless way the Korean entertainment industry chews up and spits out its idols with no regard whatsoever, but the fact remains that even when its biggest names can't manage to go beyond a tired stock of pre-digested trends, things have well and truly passed the breaking point. More than a deadline, this really does feel like an expiration date.

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26/03/2026