genre pop

BLACKPINK already accomplished the hard part. Over the past half-decade, the quartet has transcended the boundaries between K-pop and the global mainstream in ways that no other girl group had done before, turning the momentum from their 2010s singles and projects into a 2020s breakthrough, particularly in North America.

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Since 2020, BLACKPINK has released a pair of albums, including their first Billboard 200-topper, 2022’s Born Pink; collaborated with Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez and Cardi B, among others; become the highest-charting Korean girl group in Hot 100 history, with a total of five top 40 entries; and racked up several Western awards, including a Billboard Music Award and multiple MTV VMAs. Their commercial might in the U.S. was best demonstrated with their live show, which had reached stadium levels by 2023 and included a headlining gig at Coachella that year, making BLACKPINK the first K-pop act in that night-capping slot.

All of which is to say: JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ have climbed a mountain together that no other commercial act like them has conquered before. Over the past six months, however, they’ve all set out to achieve something different — this time separately, and all roughly at the same time.

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This Friday (Mar. 7), JENNIE will release her debut album, RUBY, one week after LISA released her own, Alter Ego. Jisoo released her debut solo mini-album, Amortage, two weeks before that, and while ROSÉ issued her own debut album, Rosie, in December, its singles have been promoted throughout early 2025, including with a handful of live performances. Members of pop collectives releasing solo projects after their original groups achieved mainstream success is a practice that stretches back decades, from The Beatles to the Jackson 5 to the Spice Girls to One Direction. Yet we’ve never seen every member of a group attempt to establish themselves as individual stars quite so simultaneously, four voices flooding the zone across a three-month span.

To some degree, BLACKPINK’s members launching solo music at the same time can be chalked up to a scheduling quirk, based on when studio material is completed and promotional opportunities arise; each member is working with a different U.S. major label partner (Columbia for JENNIE, RCA for LISA, Warner for JISOO and Atlantic for ROSÉ), who all have their own plans for how to most effectively roll out a debut project. And because BLACKPINK’s return as a collective is imminent, with a new world tour scheduled to kick off in early July, those respective teams have been working with limited time frames to set up solo eras.

Still — that’s a lot of BLACKPINK solo projects, being released very close to one another. The output could risk alienating casual fans, whose music consumption might be cannibalized by competing projects from members of the same group. BLACKPINK fans were always going to support these solo endeavors, but JENNIE, JISOO, LISA and ROSÉ are trying to establish their own voices, and build individual fan bases. Even if they’re not in competition with each other, they are competing to command an unfamiliar listener’s attention. 

Yet as these solo releases have played out over the past few months, the BLACKPINK members have not drowned each other out. Instead, this onslaught may have been the best thing for the group’s four stars — and also, for the group itself.

Let’s start with the biggest crossover hit of the solo releases so far: “APT.,” ROSÉ’s fizzy pop-rock chant-along alongside Bruno Mars, has become a legitimate smash in the U.S. and worldwide. Upon its October release, “APT.” became the first top 10 hit on the Hot 100 for any K-pop female act, and has since spent multiple months in the upper frame of the chart, along with reaching No. 1 on the Global 200 chart and staying there for a record 16 total weeks (and counting). 

That huge single has been complemented by other chart achievements from the BLACKPINK members: ROSÉ’s debut album Rosie bowed at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 in December, while LISA has notched three Hot 100 hits from her Alter Ego project thus far, the same number as JENNIE from her RUBY album. Both of those albums have a solid shot at following Rosie into the top 10 of the Billboard 200 over the next two weeks. 

The commercial wins have been accompanied by enviable co-signs and pop culture showcases. Just as ROSÉ corralled Mars for a team-up, LISA’s Alter Ego features collaborations with Future, Tyla, Megan Thee Stallion and Rosalía, among others; its lead track, “Born Again,” has guest spots by Doja Cat and Raye, both of whom joined LISA at the Oscars last Sunday, where they performed a medley of James Bond theme songs in front of nearly 20 million viewers. Meanwhile, JENNIE has already released collaborations with Doechii and Dominic Fike from RUBY, and the album’s track list also includes Dua Lipa, Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis. 

JENNIE’s most successful single with a North American artist, “One of the Girls” with The Weeknd, resulted from her supporting turn on The Idol last year; a few months later, LISA is co-starring on the current season of The White Lotus. Along with different fashion spotlights and TV performances, the appearances in high-profile HBO dramas has helped increase the members’ visibility in the States – they’re more familiar to U.S. audiences now, totally outside the K-pop purview.

Those opportunities would be valuable at any pace, but combined with the rapidity of these solo rollouts, the BLACKPINK members have worked toward a type of ubiquity that has no doubt shaken some unfamiliar listeners awake. Did you know that in each of the past five weeks, Spotify’s flagship new-release playlist New Music Friday has had a song by a BLACKPINK member in the first five slots? They have highlighted songs like JENNIE’S “Love Hangover” with Fike, JISOO’s “Earthquake” and LISA’s “Fxck Up the World” with Future — and with RUBY out this Friday, that streak is all but certain to continue for a sixth consecutive frame.

Part of the reason why this rising-tide, all-boats model can work for the BLACKPINK members has to do with the circumstances of the group itself. These solo projects are taking place during a pause in group activity, not a hiatus; this is not a situation like an *NSYNC or a Destiny’s Child, in which one member of a group is clearly poised to ascend to solo fame and leave their cohorts behind, and it’s also not like a One Direction or a Fifth Harmony, in which one member has abruptly split to start their own career, while the others have to figure out how and when to catch up. 

Instead, these concurrent rollouts have acted as a stopgap that’s been creatively fulfilling and drama-free — especially since a date has already been set for everyone to return to the BLACKPINK mothership for a world tour. In this way, the solo endeavors have functioned similarly to the group’s fellow K-pop superstars BTS (whose staggered military obligations has caused a more sprawling timeline of solo projects, but the promise of an eventual return remains), but also recalls rap groups of the late 20th century, whose members would peel off to record solo albums before linking back up for a group project. BLACKPINK probably didn’t examine the similarities between themselves and a post-36 Chambers Wu-Tang Clan, but that has unwittingly become a highly successful model.

In any regard, the members have offered nothing but praise for what their group mates have accomplished on their own. “We know each other so well and know how much energy we have to put into every single project,” Lisa told Billboard late last year. “So we want to support and say, ‘You did really well!’ … This is what we all wanted to do, so I just wanted to say that I really do love their songs.”

Ultimately, this release strategy has created a balance — giving each member room to shine on their own, and the overlapping campaigns underlining their different music styles. Alter Ego demonstrated LISA’s pop-rap versatility, JENNIE’S advance RUBY singles underlined her effortlessly cool hook deployment, JISOO’s Amortage was defined by a graceful pop sensibility, and ROSÉ’s Rosie took a playful approach to radio-ready singer-songwriter fare. Longtime BLACKPINK fans had located the nuances in the four members’ approaches – but when stacked separately against one another, their singular talents were made more evident to a wider audience. A generation removed from each Spice Girl getting tagged with a different look and nickname, the BLACKPINK members have gotten to establish their personas by more artistic, and less reductive, means.

And soon, those personas will have the opportunity to live in front of stadium audiences. With the BLACKPINK world tour kickoff less than four months away, we’ll see how the recent solo material is incorporated into the group’s live show. Beyond that, future BLACKPINK studio output will be driven by four women who have had their confidence grow as artists and performers, and whose respective skill sets have been given room to expand and strengthen. BLACKPINK was already huge before this recent period of solo releases, but there’s no doubt that they’ve scooped up at least some new fans for the collective with their individual efforts — new fans of “Apt.” or Amortage or Alter Ego diving further down the rabbit hole, and becoming full-blown BLINKs.