BLACKPINK – “The Girls”

Earlier this year, the massively successful South Korean girl group BLACKPINK headlined Coachella, becoming the first K-pop act to achieve that distinction. Jennie, one of the group’s members, also starred in the Weeknd’s HBO show The Idol. While BLACKPINK are easily the biggest girl group in the world right now, contemporaries like NewJeans and Aespa have been making serious strides in recent weeks, and now BLACKPINK have released a new single called “The Girls.” It’s their first new track since the 2022 mini-album Born Pink.

“The Girls” is coming out as part of BLACKPINK’s mobile game, which I guess is just called The Game. The group recorded the track entirely in English, with two Western collaborators: Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic frontman who’s written a lot of big hits for a lot of big artists, and Michael “Lindgren” Schulz, a German producer whose done a lot of work with K-pop group TWICE. “The Girls” has a weirdly offputting computer-animated video, where all the BLACKPINK members look like Bratz dolls with gigantic heads, but it’s a solidly catchy piece of laser-focused pop music. Check it out below.