K-Pop

Lisa looks stumped. She raises her eyebrows slightly and purses her lips, staring out from underneath her immaculate, walnut-brown bangs. She is trying to answer a question that for most people qualifies as Small Talk 101, but for her is a Sphinx-level riddle: “Where do you live?”
“I can’t really tell where I’m based,” she says, breaking into a giddy giggle. As one-quarter of the record-setting, superlative-defying K-pop girl group Blackpink, she called Seoul home. But now? She’s all over the place: Los Angeles, where we’re meeting and where she’s been spending a lot of time recording new music; her native Thailand, where she also filmed the highly anticipated third season of HBO’s The White Lotus; and Paris, where you can find her front row at fashion shows as a new house ambassador for Louis Vuitton. “I don’t even know which time zone I’m living now,” says Lisa, clad in a Kith track jacket and baggy Celine jeans, as she sips orange juice in a tucked-away booth of the star-friendly Polo Lounge at The Beverly Hills Hotel.

In her rare downtime, 27-year-old Lisa (also known as Lalisa Manobal) likes to hit up Pop Mart, the international toy-store chain whose adorable characters she can’t get enough of. (She once visited three different Paris locations in a single day in search of a rare figurine, and she jokes that she has more collectibles than furniture: “I have no space to walk anymore!”) Or she’ll seek out the best Thai food wherever she may be. Everyone in L.A. tells her to go to Anajak or Jitlada, two local culinary institutions, “but it’s not the OG taste for me,” she says. “It doesn’t taste like home. It tastes different.” She prefers Ruen Pair.

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“I just randomly walk in. I don’t really do any makeup, so I just go in like this” — she pulls her hair over her face — “and they barely notice me.” When people do recognize her in public, they usually play it cool, at least in America. “They come to you like, ‘I just want to say I love your music, I just want to say hi!,’ and leave,” she says in a chirpy faux-American accent. And if they don’t? “Well, of course, I always have him,” Lisa says, nodding toward the burly tattooed man at the next booth over who, I now realize, is her bodyguard.

Welcome to the totally fabulous, totally exhausting, jet-setting life of one of pop’s most exciting stars. On her fast and furious recent single “Rockstar,” she recites airport codes like they’re her ABCs (“Been MIA, BKK so pretty!”), flexes her multilingual skills (“ ‘Lisa, can you teach me Japanese?’ I said, ‘Hai, hai!’ ”) and name-drops her designer partnerships (“Tight dress, LV sent it!”) with the casual ease of someone describing their sock drawer. She’s the rare pop star for whom bone-rattling bangers about life in the fast lane and personal, autobiographical material are one in the same. As Lisa embarks on a solo career outside the girl group that made her famous, this world-building has been one of her biggest joys. “At first, I was scared and nervous because I never really come out here to do my own stuff,” she says, before lowering her voice as if she’s not supposed to say what comes next. “And now I’m having fun,” she whispers. “When [my singles] came out, the reaction from the fans, it’s healing me. It’s like, ‘Oh, my God. Yeah — I did a great job!’ ”

Diesel dress

Joelle Grace Taylor

Success in a pop group is no guarantee of success as a solo artist, but then again, Blackpink is no ordinary group. With its multinational members, onomatopoeic hooks and blockbuster music videos, the quartet was practically engineered for world domination. Since 2016, Blackpink has racked up 40 billion official on-demand global streams, according to Luminate; scored nine Billboard Hot 100 hits; and played some of the world’s biggest stages. The act was the first Korean girl group to play Coachella in 2019 and the first Korean act of any kind to headline the festival in 2023. By the end of Blackpink’s 2022-23 Born Pink world tour, named for its first No. 1 album on the Billboard 200, the group was selling out stadiums in the United States — one of only a handful of K-pop acts to have done so.

Alongside peers like BTS, Blackpink helped dismantle the lingering walls between “K-pop” and the American mainstream, making regular appearances on morning and late-night shows, recording music in English and teaming with U.S. hit-makers, eased by a partnership between YG Entertainment, the group’s Korean home, and Interscope Records.

Though all of Blackpink’s members have star power in spades — Jennie’s unbothered cool, Rosé’s singer-songwriter smarts and Jisoo’s sly humor and older-sister elegance — Lisa is an unmissable force in the group. She raps with the big, bouncy energy of the Pixar lamp, and her swaggering flows have made her a compelling face of hip-hop’s globalization. Her 2021 solo track “Money,” released through YG and built around a brassy beat worthy of Hot 97, reached No. 36 on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart — making her the first K-pop artist to enter its top 40 — and she fit right in next to Megan Thee Stallion and Ozuna on that year’s DJ Snake team-up, “SG.” As Lisa has been recording solo music, she has realized genre-fluency is her ace: “I kind of… kill it in every single thing?” she says sheepishly, twirling her hair. “So I’m like, ‘Oh, why not!’ ”

In the past, K-pop’s brightest breakout stars have typically pursued solo careers either independently (like rapper-singer CL of YG girl group 2NE1) or through the company behind their groups (such as the members of BTS, whose home base, HYBE, has a global partnership with Universal Music Group). Lisa, however, is pursuing a different model with the creation of her own management company and label, Lloud, and a partnership with RCA Records in which she will own her masters.

“It was very clear that she wanted to go for global domination as one of the biggest pop stars on the planet, and we’re right there with her,” RCA COO John Fleckenstein says. K-pop companies — typically one-stop shops that combine management, label, agent and other functions under one roof — “work in a certain way in terms of how they market, promote and A&R everything, and over the years, they’ve established this architecture that the fan base is really used to,” he says. “It’s pretty rare for someone to go from one architecture to another.”

Area jacket, Coperni boots.

Joelle Grace Taylor

And Lisa’s not the only one learning how — so are her bandmates, as they all simultaneously launch their next phases. Jennie released the sun-kissed bop “Mantra” in October through Columbia Records and her own Odd Atelier company. Rosé will release her debut album in December through Atlantic Records; her first single, the punky Bruno Mars duet “APT.,” debuted at No. 8 on the Hot 100 — a record high for a female K-pop soloist. Jisoo, meanwhile, has focused on acting in Korean TV shows and movies, but she unveiled her own company, Blissoo, in February, and Lisa thinks she’ll eventually do music, too. Coming from the world of K-pop idols — where stars are not exactly known for their agency and the quasi-diplomatic pressures on their shoulders can be immense — it’s a whole new competitive landscape.

As Lisa finishes her debut solo album against the ticking clock of Blackpink’s planned 2025 reunion, can she transform herself from a K-pop queen into a global girl boss? She’s up for the challenge. Technically, she’s the CEO of Lloud, though she squirms at the title. “I don’t want to say that,” she says, grinning. “Call me boss — call me Boss Lisa.”

When Blackpink wrapped its yearlong, globe-traversing, 66-date Born Pink world tour in September 2023, sleep was low on Lisa’s list of priorities. “I was super tired,” she says, “but I don’t know, I feel guilty when I’m not working. It’s like, I need to do something. It was weird. My body is sending me a sign: ‘Beep! Beep! Beep! Don’t rest too much!’ ”

She had already been thinking a lot about her future. Blackpink celebrated its seventh anniversary that summer — a critical milestone for K-pop groups, as seven years is a common contract length in the industry. (K-pop fans even speak of the “seven-year curse” to describe groups’ tendency to break up at this juncture.) For years, Blackpink’s trajectory had had a clear outline. But now, as its members pondered a contract renewal, they had to make decisions about an uncertain future — including what exactly they wanted from it, both together and individually. “Of course we want to do more, because Blackpink, it’s part of our lives. We still want to accomplish more,” Lisa says. “But on the other side, we also wanted to do something for our solo careers.”

They decided on an unusual arrangement: The members re-signed with YG for group activities but became free agents for their individual projects (though Rosé ultimately signed with The Black Label, which YG has had a stake in, for solo management). It was time for Lisa to chart her own course, and to do that, she needed her own team.

The first person she reached out to was Alice Kang, who had spent five years on the management team at YG’s L.A. branch, where she touched a bit of everything — marketing, merchandise, label relations — and got to know Lisa well. Joojong “JJ” Joe, who headed North American operations for YG for several years, had assigned Kang to be Lisa’s point person on staff. “Both of them have easygoing and fun personalities, so I think that’s why they have worked perfectly [together] so far,” he says. After spending a lot of time away from home on tour with Blackpink, Kang had left her job in late 2023 and was looking forward to some quiet time off as she figured out what was next. “I’m like, ‘Holidays are coming up, it’s the end of the year — family time!’ ” Kang says, laughing. “And then Lisa was like, ‘Hey!’ ”

Vaillant coat, Coperni dress.

Joelle Grace Taylor

Lisa pitched her on starting what would become Lloud. “She’s had this drive to really make her presence known in this U.S. music market,” recalls Kang, Lloud’s head of global business and management. Though Lloud brings to mind other artist-founded, multipronged companies like Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment, Lisa says she hasn’t thought about eventually signing other artists, and she doesn’t cop to having any Rihanna-level empire-building aspirations. “I feel like Lloud is like my safe zone that always focuses on Lisa, supports Lisa,” she says. “I was just thinking about what I want to achieve this year, [taking it] year by year. So this year, what I wanted to do is work on new music and focus on that.”

As Lisa and Kang mapped out the steps they would need to take, they also brought in Joe, who had left YG as well, as an adviser. (He has a brand consultancy, ABrands, and an artist management and consulting company, The Colors Artists Group.) Much of Joe’s job at YG had been networking and relationship-building in the United States, and he helped Lisa construct her core team and set up meetings with major labels.

Lisa clicked with RCA right away. “As soon as I got in the car [after meeting with them], I was telling Alice, ‘I kind of love them!’ ” she says. It was mostly a gut feeling, but Lisa appreciated that they had done their homework: Lisa has five cats, and RCA made her a gift basket with cat-themed paraphernalia like stickers and plushies. “They made the meeting very, very personalized to Lisa specifically,” Kang says, “and they had already thought out plans on what they were going to do to help support Lisa and make her a bigger star than she already is.”

The gist of their pitch: amplify Lloud’s work and complement Lisa’s strengths. “K-pop is kind of a defined universe in terms of what the fan base expects and what people are going to do, and for Lisa, it was a very conscious choice to work with someone like us, because of the resources and connections that we have,” says Fleckenstein, who notes, for instance, that terrestrial radio play is one area where acts from the K-pop world “struggle a bit.” “She’s very clear on where this is going and what it should feel like, but we help her fill in the gaps about how to get there.”

RCA also made some key introductions — like connecting her to choreographer Sean Bankhead, who’s worked with Normani and Tate McRae and collaborated with Lisa on videos and live performances, including her fiery MTV Video Music Awards medley in September. Bankhead calls Lisa a “robot” when it comes to picking up choreography and says she mastered much of the “Rockstar” routine on location in Bangkok the day before filming started. “Which is really unheard of,” he says. “She’s a trouper.”

Mugler dress, Paris Texas shoes.

Joelle Grace Taylor

For Lisa, directing this phase of her career has been eye-opening. Does being the boss of her own company mean she now enjoys such corporate thrills as, say, budgets and expense reports? “Oh, of course,” Lisa says. “Nothing is boring yet because everything is so new. It’s like, ‘Oh, my God. I have to do this too?’ OK!

“Now I know how much it all costs,” she continues. “I’ve been under YG, and everyone was taking care of that, so I never really knew what’s going on or how much we spent for our music videos or photo shoots or hotels. But now I do kind of know about it, so I was like, ‘Oh, OK — no first class anymore,’ ” she says with a laugh as she mimes poring over a spreadsheet. (“The worst boss would be the one who doesn’t make decisions,” Joe says. “She makes decisions, so that’s great.”)

Compared with a giant company like YG, Lloud feels “like a family business,” Lisa says. It has fewer than 10 employees right now, and in true startup fashion, department responsibilities are porous. “We’ve been just so busy, so we haven’t had time to hire people,” Joe says of the biggest challenges facing Lloud. They’re building the car as they’re driving to the destination. “We’re shooting a music video and discussing the next music video at the spot,” he says. “We’re always doing the next one when we’re doing something [else].”

Which, at least for now, is how Lisa likes it. “These days, when I go to a restaurant to have a meal with Alice and my team, we just can’t stop talking about work. Even though it’s like, ‘OK, for this dinner, we’re just going to celebrate’ — we can’t do that. There’s no line,” Lisa says. “There’s so much stuff going on, so when I think about something and it’s popping into my head, I just have to say it right away. Otherwise, I’ll forget.” She pauses. “Yeah, I need to fix that.”

Success for Lisa is in her name. Born Pranpriya Manobal, she auditioned for YG when she was 13 years old. When she didn’t hear back, her mother took her to a fortune teller who recommended she change her name for good luck — a common practice in Thai culture. “We really wanted to get it,” Lisa told me in 2021, when we were speaking about her YG solo tracks. According to Lisa, the week after she rechristened herself “Lalisa,” which roughly means “one who is praised,” YG invited her to train in Seoul.

K-pop’s trainee system is like an artist-development program on steroids. Aspiring stars — chosen through global auditions as tweens and teens — spend years studying music and dance as they vie for a spot in a group. It is a grueling, pressure-cooker environment, with long hours, few days off, frequent evaluations and the constant threat of being cut. For Lisa, who spoke some English but didn’t know any Korean when she started, it could be isolating. “They wanted me to focus on speaking Korean more, so they told all the girls who trained with me: ‘No English with Lalisa,’ ” she recalls. But for Lisa, there was no other path. “I feel like I’m born to be onstage,” she says. (Her future bandmates agreed: “Lisa would always get As for everything,” Jennie told Billboard in 2019.)

Joelle Grace Taylor

Now, in her solo career, Lisa has made her own artist development a guiding priority. One of the first things Joe did last fall was help set up recording sessions. “She’s been working with one producer,” Joe says, referring to Teddy Park, who is credited as a writer or producer on the majority of Blackpink’s songs. “So I’m like, ‘Maybe you should just work with a different producer to see who can work together well.’ ”

Unlike many pop-group alums, Lisa has not felt particularly stifled in Blackpink. She and her bandmates have always credited Park with encouraging their input, and though Lisa has started co-writing some of her new material, she won’t be racking up credits just to prove a point. “I’m not like, ‘OK, I’m going to sit down and write the whole thing,’ ” she says. Still, she had her defined role in the group and has played it dutifully. “In Blackpink, I’m a rapper, so I always rap,” she says. “But now it’s a chance for me to show the world that I’m capable of [so much more].”

With its pummeling beats and Tame Impala-esque breakdown, “Rockstar” bridged her Blackpink sound and her next chapter. “We knew on launch we really wanted to come correct with her existing core fan base,” Fleckenstein says. Subsequent singles gave Lisa more room to experiment and play with new textures in her voice. “New Woman” is a bilingual team-up with Rosalía that features a dizzying beat switch and credits from Swedish hit-makers Max Martin and Tove Lo. The syrupy “Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me)” interpolates Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me” and is of a piece with recent disco-lite hits like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” and Doja Cat’s “Say So.” “I feel like I have more creative freedom with everything,” Lisa says.

Diesel dress, Paris Texas boots.

Joelle Grace Taylor

That includes the freedom to be a little edgier. When pop stars go solo after starting in a group, they usually break from their youthful pasts with strong statements of adult independence. But the rules are often different for K-pop stars, who have historically been expected to maintain squeaky-clean images by abstaining from dating and partying (at least publicly). Although those norms are evolving, they still shape the industry: Seunghan, a member of the SM Entertainment boy band RIIZE, was suspended from and, this year, ultimately left his group after photos and videos of him kissing a woman and smoking leaked online.

Lisa has been growing up gradually. When Blackpink headlined Coachella, she took the stage for a pole-dance routine before launching into a new, explicit version of “Money” packed with F-bombs — and fans noted online how gleefully she seemed to deliver them. (“I was waiting for that moment to sing that version,” Lisa tells me, though she notes that the occasion was Jennie’s idea: “She was like, ‘Lisa, just do it. It’s Coachella. Everybody’s doing it at Coachella.’ ”) Today, there’s a palpable maturity to Lisa’s new era, from her October performance at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show alongside lingerie-clad models to some bolder lyrics. It’s hard to imagine a double entendre as blatant as “I’m a rock star … Baby, make you rock hard” fitting neatly into Blackpink’s brand of playful sensuality.

“It’s a little looser [now],” Lisa says of her image, but she feels she has earned it. “We’re not rookies anymore. I’m 27 and headed toward 30. Of course I’m still young, yes, but I feel like it’s more flexible for us. And it’s nothing crazy,” she adds. “I feel like I’m just doing whatever I want, and it doesn’t hurt anyone. As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings.” (As for her dating life, when I gently tease her about the “green-eyed French boy” she sings about in “Moonlit Floor,” Lisa — who is rumored to be dating LVMH heir Frédéric Arnault — looks over her shoulder, delivers an expert hair-flip and says coyly, “Well, I didn’t write that [song].”)

Bankhead says she’s navigating her evolution in real time. “I’ve always had those performances or music videos that have shock value, whether it’s Lil Nas X dancing naked in the shower or Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion doing a scissor move at the Grammys,” he says of his previous work. With Lisa, “There are a couple of times that I will push the envelope, and she’s like, ‘I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that yet.’ And then other times, like when I had this idea to do a more sexy breakdown for the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, she was like, ‘I think I want to do more.’ ” For now, any growing pains are primarily physical. Says Bankhead: “She had a little bit of a groin injury because we kept doing that split move in those heels.”

The best part of a Blackpink show isn’t the explosive pyrotechnics or glittering costume changes, but the encores: The four singers, dressed in their own merch, skip their usual windmill-limb choreography and just goof around with one another. They seemed like the rare girl group who, at the height of their powers, were not sick of one another. And their close bonds go way back. Lisa recalls that during trainee breaks, when most students would go home to visit their families, Jisoo — who grew up just outside of Seoul — would stay behind to keep her company.

Today, and as the members unveil their solo projects, they are among one another’s biggest supporters on social media.

“We know each other so well and know how much energy we have to put into every single project,” Lisa says. “So we want to support and say, ‘You did really well!’ Like, Jennie and Rosie just released their own songs, and we’re on texts, we’re on FaceTime. They’re like family. I’m just so happy that they’re releasing something. This is what we all wanted to do, so I just wanted to say that I really do love their songs.”

She confirms the group will reunite in 2025 — “I can’t wait,” she says — though exactly what form the reunion will take appears to be up in the air. YG announced earlier this year that the group would have an official comeback as well as a world tour next year. But when I mention the tour to Lisa, she squints. “That’s what they say?” she responds, in a voice that conveys some skepticism. (“I don’t know,” Kang tells me later. “We’ll have to wait and see what YG confirms.”)

How Lisa will juggle her own career with her group obligations going forward is something “we’re going to figure out as we go,” Fleckenstein says. “My gut feeling is, it will be a benefit to everybody. There really aren’t rules, and I don’t see why there should be any kind of rules around this either.”

Joelle Grace Taylor

Lisa currently doesn’t have plans to tour on her own, and she doesn’t think she can until she has a finished body of work. So for now, she’s full speed ahead on the album. “It’s so embarrassing to say this,” she says when I ask what music she has been enjoying lately, “but I listen to my album. I’m trying to figure it out, the track list and everything, what I can change in there.” Some unfinished songs her team plays for me evoke British iconoclast M.I.A. and Loose-era Nelly Furtado. Will there be ballads? “Everything’s there,” she says. “I think they’re going to be shocked at how capable I am [at] doing so many things.”

When I first met Lisa in 2019, on the band’s first proper stateside trip here in L.A., she seemed excited to take on the world — she bounded toward the window when she spotted the Hollywood sign — but also nervous about all the expectations on the group’s shoulders. The looser, wise-cracking Lisa of today seems like she is genuinely enjoying the ride. What advice would she give the Lisa of nearly six years ago?

“I’m not going to tell her anything,” she says, wide-eyed. “That’s not fun! It’s like when the fortune teller tells you something, and you have that stuck in your head. If someone says, ‘You’re going to win this thing,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, well, I’m going to win that thing anyway, so I’m not going to do anything now,’ then you’re not going to achieve that. So I guess I will not say anything to my old self.” She leans back in the booth. “ ‘Whatever you’re doing right now? Just keep going.’ ”

This story appears in the Nov. 16, 2024, issue of Billboard.