Blackpink's success may be the best known thing about it. Yet the quartet's speedy ascent _ ahead of Friday's release of its official debut album, no less _ has come at a moment when Blackpink's approach feels almost entirely out of alignment with pop music's prevailing trends. Eager though Blackpink may have been to adapt, "The Album" _ which the group says it recorded in part during COVID-19 isolation _ still plays like a transmission from a previous era. Which needn't have been a problem: Pop is always eating itself _ just look at BTS' disco throwback "Dynamite." The sureness of its success aside, in that way it fails the test of old pop as well as the test of new.

Source: Los Angeles Times October 05, 2020 01:18 UTC