Oh, BLACKPINK. What are we going to do with you? You’re K-pop’s eternal influencers, but you only grace us with new music every once in a blue moon. With more direct competitors emerging each year, I’m amazed how loyal fans have remained given such little return on their investment. We’ve been promised a BLACKPINK comeback next month (I’ll believe it when I see it), but for now we have their PUBG Mobile tie-in Ready For Love and its animated avatars of the girls.
Ready For Love has been kicking around for awhile now, though never available in its full form. It’s an oddly generic song, both by BLACKPINK and big gaming promo standards. The girls bring flavor to anything they record. Their voices are just too recognizable to get lost in generic production. But as a song, Ready For Love is a minor stopgap. We have all the known BLACKPINK hallmarks: strong vocal melodies, charismatic rap. But they’re wrapped in a song that, quite frankly, feels beneath a group of this caliber. Yes, it’s basically an OST. What can we really expect? The thing is, when you release as infrequently as BLACKPINK do, anything you record will be met with high expectations.
Ready For Love frames its beat-drop chorus with a catchy repetition of the titular phrase, bringing bite to an instrumental that feels faceless and oddly cheap. If you must craft your song around a central drop, the production had better be impactful and immaculately arranged. Ready For Love‘s drop simply limps along, aided by the girls but never able to become the dynamic focal point it needs to be. In the end, the track sounds like the holdover it is — not awful by any means, but nothing we haven’t heard a thousand times before.
| Hooks | 7 |
| Production | 7 |
| Longevity | 8 |
| Bias | 8 |
| RATING | 7.5 |
The Bias List // K-Pop Reviews & Discussion 
i would have probably hated this song in the hands of a lesser group… good on blackpink for making it work i guess!! i’d say im a little more hopeful for their comeback
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Blackpink does make this song listenable. I really can’t believe how low effort that drop sounds though. I would take any of their other drops, even the one in “how you like that” over this. Also the virtual avatars and the thumbnail of no the video feel very aespa to me.
Hopefully blackpink will give us something much stronger for their next release
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Cannot be bothered to listen to this when Beyonce just dropped AOTY like I’m sorry Blackpink…
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Yeah, it’s fine. It’s listenable. The girls themselves sound nice. But before the second chorus I turned off the song. Everything is just so dull and predictable here. 7.25 for me.
Hope that the actual comeback won’t let ’em down.
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I like what Blackpink add to it, though I was telling my friend the chorus felt strangely under-produced. I always expect K/DA levels of production when it comes to these things, but this was kinda…just alright. Lisa’s rap was very cool though, reminded me of 2010 Snoop Dogg lol
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yeah. its finally here. and the final result is.. its just there.
very lackluster and i can tell i will forget about this song in just a day
+ the adlib ” call me when you ready cause you know im already ready ” is just.. grating and throws me off.
the rap? oh baby, we dont talk about that.. things might get bad.. *insert ajayll’s dissapointed face during her listening to sweetener by ariana grande*
we are going to pretend… we didnt hear that…
the only highllight of this song is just jisoo’s last verse ( which is pretty good imo, at least this song got a good point in there )
also dont talk to me about rose’s lalalalalalala-ing for like 30 seconds to the ending
it feels like they dont know what to sing and chose to sing vocables.
there is a reason why this thing stays unreleased for years.
4/10
anw, stream beyonce’s new album. its a BOP FESTIVAL.
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I’m more amazed people like their awful music. Besides Playing With Fire, Lovesick Girls, As If It Was Your Last, Don’t Know What To Do and You Never Know (and maybe Stay and Forever Young) their discography mostly consists of soulless music that sounds just like western pop. Terrible stuff. Their solo’s were terrible too, only Rosé put her heart into it I’ll say that much. Only interesting thing for me is Jisoo’s voice. Jisoo did some beautiful live solo’s. She put her heart in those and they are just wonderful. I’m a Jisoo stan I’ll admit it 😉
Meanwhile TWICE released a Japan album with the wonderful Celebrate and beautiful b-sides: Tick Tock, Flow Like Waves, Bitter Sweet, Sandcastle and That’s All I’m Saying. Even their song for LUX, Just Be Yourself, is great.
And there are so many lesser known groups with much better music than Blackpink in my opinion.
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I agree partially but I don’t agree with ALL of the solos or songs are bad. The girls have a LOT of potential but YG isn’t, well kinda letting them use it.
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Hi Nick I was wondering if you listen to Beyoncé new album? If you did I would love to hear your thoughts
I really do like alien superstar
And also Virgo’s groove never thought Beyoncé would make a disco inspired pop song and those vocals she really never disappoints 💕😭
REAL LOVED how summer renaissance sampled a Donna summer song ( i feel love) ughh it’s just pure perfection 🔥🤍🤍
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It’s a great album!
To be honest, apart from a few songs it didn’t connect with me on first listen, mostly because it wasn’t what I expected at all. I was genuinely shocked to see everyone proclaiming it “album of the year” just minutes after it was released. I wondered what I was missing!
It turns out, the album takes a few listens to really sink in. It’s so freeform in places. You know how I like my tautly structured pop songs! All it took was a shifting of expectations and I was able to surrender to the grooves. It’s a fantastic body of work with a lot of layers and textures and too many quotable lines to count.
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The album reminds me of Black is King and Lemonade, in that it makes so many references and homages so densely packed that unless you study it closely with a guide, it just washes over you. So many song credits to so many people! To me it like a 21st century aural equivalent of some Renaissance altar piece, where unless you know all the references, all the attributes of each saint and the symbolism buried in a simple thing like a crumbling wall with plants growing out of it, its just a nice painting.
Its AOTY leading candidate because it is 1) Beyonce’s first full album since Lemonade 2) packed with so many references and credits to earlier dance eras as a vote for this would be a vote for an entire Grammy-neglected swath of music and 3) its about damn time Bey gets AOTY.
For me, I have listened to the full album and songs twice or thrice, and while I admire the record and its ambition largely realized, it is not for me. I don’t know when I would listen to the album – what would I be doing, where, with whom. Copious swearing, sex references, and brand and money dropping make it unpleasant at times and inappropriate to play in most of the places I listen to music. I listen almost every week to a live DJ on the radio mixing up Funk Friday, with something nice to drink in hand, which is more my style, more overt human playing an instrument groove, less crafted in a computer. DJ did mix in Beyonce’s Break My Soul last night because he is good like that.
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This was all wrong for me. The song was generic, but that’s not what baffles me the most. This was a video game! If EVER you have the opportunity to go high concept, big sound, all the songs BP excels at, then this is it! Look at the K/DA stuff or even Dreamcatcher’s Deja Vu. Those are HUGE bombastic or theatrical songs. This was something that was obviously a hold over and just released to the game without being FOR it. If they wanted to beat out the hype all these new groups are causing and get people amped up for their new release, this was it. They dropped the ball on this one. The girls always do their best with the material, so that inn’s much of a discussion. For me this was also a time and place thing, and I think they blew an opportunity in that regard. I think this is a perfectly fine album B-side for Blackpink. But when you are away from the music industry and haven’t released a new song in 2 years, leading off with B-side material is a bad call.
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Yep, totally agree. If ever was the place to go big full out theatrical, an opportunity like this was served up on a silver platter for it. And they airballed.
I still play the K/DA “Pop Stars” song often.
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Same! It’s on quite a few of my I need energy and please for the love of all that is holy get me through to the end of this work day playlists. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel or anything, but it’s great at what it does and delivers the energy that the event called for. Such a wasted opportunity for BP both musically and to dial up the anticipation around their comeback. Sometimes it really seems like YG both markets and chooses the songs for them (and all their groups) in a bubble that ignores the outside world. It’s like no one has broken the news to them that they are no longer sonically setting the trends like they were in 2011 (although I’d be happy to let them prove me wrong with even just an EP that comes close to the same quality and impact that 2NE1’s 2NE1 EP had back then).
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Man. This song isn’t even that great. It’s also a lot better than most of the material they’ve released over the past four years. I dunno. I just gotta feel for them, but hey, they’re still wildly popular despite not having a lot to show for it musically. Shrug.
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It sounds a bit phoned in, doesn’t it.
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Given there’s a snippet of them recording this song in their documentary they released in 2020 (that was likely recorded a year or two earlier than that even), they probably just took whatever they had laying around and slid it to PUBG.
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So it wasn’t even phoned in, the producers just flipped through old files to see what wasn’t used yet somewhere. Post hoc songcraft.
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That’s definitely not how you get asked to do these again. Even very popular Japanese artists write songs specifically for the projects they are hired for (anime or movie theme songs). I’m bringing that up over your typical Hollywood OST because I can’t see a situation in which BP would be asked to do one in the West that wouldn’t just be someone sampling and using a song they’ve already released.
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My only is…is this the actual comeback or is there more to come. Because if after 2 years we get is a PUBG Advertisement song then…
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Question^
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I agree. Is this all??? Also I heard the demo of Lisa’s rap and it’s MUCH better
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There has to be more since YG has dropped a statement about their MV filming, and this wasn’t it. This was just a collaboration with PUBG that is part of the rollout to their comeback.
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*Pretends to be shocked*
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It sounds nice. It got addicting but it’s missing a lot. I don’t really like the animation because: 1. The choreography looks terrible 2. I don’t want Blackpink to become a better version of Aespa’s , well avatars. 3. I think Jisoo and Jennie look weird? I don’t know if anybody can relate?
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Yes, Jennie and Jisoo do not remotely resemble the real thing haha
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Honestly this song deserves a 6/10 cause of vocals and tune but it’s missing Jennie’s rap. I am happy that Jisoo got some time to sing so I gave an extra point for that
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X4’s present is addicting tho
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Blackpink sounds better when they do EDM pop (i.e. PwF, Forever Young, DKWTD, Lovesick Girls)
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Probably won’t listen to this song a lot (and I don’t care about it either since it’s just a collab). The drop could be less predictable and deliver a more thrilling melody. But I’m fine with this and found it better than the badass, girl crush sound BP is known for
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In my opinion, the best thing Blackpink can do is leave YG. Then maybe they’ll actually be singers instead of models and get better music. But I don’t see them leaving, or they will leave and go to different agencies, thus ending Blackpink. God forbid they get the 2NE1 treatment, but I could see that happening too. I haven’t been a fan of their stuff for a while and the fandom is so hostile it isn’t worth sticking around in it for subpar comebacks every two years.
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I wish. But I think they might have renewed their contracts already… maybe not for an additional 3 years, but I think a one year extension might be done already. The way the girls have spoken about this upcoming comebacks hints heavily that YG has a 2 year plan. My guess is that 2 year plan is one more album, a drawn out world tour, a comeback for Jennie, a Japanese language release, and a Japanese dome or Zepp tour. The only other additions I could possibly see would be another single or collaboration maybe a group release another year give or take from now and possibly more solo releases (this will probably depend on if they cover the same locations twice on different touring legs). YG is going to need income, and touring is the best way. The only way they can really do the typical long Western style tour on top of promoting new material without running out would probably be for the girls to have signed some form of extension (they always say 2 year plan). If that’s the case, I would definitely leave afterwards if I were them. YG is going to have to offer a VERY favorable contract for them to earn as much with them as they could just going straight through and international agency and distributor. Hmmm….
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Good 👍. After BP left YG and make song with non YG hand–I can predict something: People will be,
“nah, their song is bad, their song under YG is better.” Or, “their song so average. Can’t have another Teddy Park PwF, Lovesick Girl, Stay, etc etc”
Yes I do like BP to leave YG. So let’s prepare for all those things 😂
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Yeah those will happen for sure. People will always find something to complain about.
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I won’t lie, I really enjoyed this song and I added it to my playlist, but, yes, I will never see that videoclip again, it’s not for me.
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Okay, I’m glad to see people taking a genuine look at this song, because this just feels so baffling and lazy. I do not and never will get the appeal of animated music videos, unless the medium itself has some meaning in conjunction with the song. And very fittingly for Blackpink – the medium here is an advertisement.
The song is depressingly lazy and generic. As everyone has pointed out, this song has been kicking around Teddy’s hard drive for probably over 2 years now and it feels like it. The catchiest parts of the song are the snippets we already heard in the movie, so everything new just feels empty. The lyrics are as meaningless and generic as “Playing with Fire”, only here there’s no fire imagery or metaphor to play with, so it’s just meaningless cliches (“I’m ready for love”). It also doesn’t contribute anything to Blackpink’s musical identity, and it doesn’t address any of the common complaints or requests that you see from fans. No rap from Jennie, no chorus, and no more than 3 lines for Jisoo.
A lot of the commentary is, “I wouldn’t listen to it if it wasn’t Blackpink”, and people really need to clue into what that’s really saying about Blackpink as an artist.
With the video, for me, it’s 2/10 – 1 because I still love Rosie’s voice, and 1 for the animators – the only people who actually had to put a lot of work in to make this video happen.
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