Blackpink – Jump

…for our love?

[Video]
[5.20]

Leah Isobel: The newly reunited Blackpink, nearly a decade into their career and with nothing left to prove, are finally in a position to take a real risk: with “Jump,” they’ve released their first-ever identifiable song.
[5]

Claire Davidson: When I first encountered “Jump” on the radio, my first thought was, Really? This is it? It’s been nearly two years since Blackpink released a new song, and this is their comeback single? I may not like Blackpink at their most imperious, but at least the group’s blaring attempts at gravitas match the scale of their stadium-sized bravado. “Jump,” on the other hand, deflates all of the furious momentum it tries to build, beginning with a sprinting synth-bass groove that eventually devolves into zippy sound effects and sluggish trap percussion, as the members of the group exchange interchangeable flexes that feel deliberately dead-eyed. At such a fast pace, too, nearly every performer here sounds winded delivering their spitfire couplets; only Jennie, Blackpink’s resident rapper, has the outsized personality needed to reliably straddle the song’s pulsating energy. If “Jump” was the single intended to cement Blackpink’s status as a K-pop institution, I’m left seriously wanting — in this context, the Spice Girls reference on the hook only reminds me that those women released just three studio albums before disbanding.
[5]

Joshua Lu: It’s remarkable how Blackpink managed to find a sound with no overlap with any of the members’ solo work, or with any of the group’s previous material either. The techno, Eurotrance beat of “Jump” is a surprisingly apt fit for the group, evoking the kookiest of second-gen K-pop while still preserving their current edge. What starts off as an amazing bridge revealing itself as a whelming outro is admittedly disappointing, but the rest of the song provides enough adrenaline as it is.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: They avoid going full hardstyle for fear of scaring the BLINKs, or because of the downmarket gaucheness of unhyphenated EDM, or because it would just be impossible to choreograph, or for a dozen other sensible-sounding reasons. Fine. But neither hardstyle nor Blackpink at their best are about being sensible, and to paper over the excesses of their chosen genre with regimented melodic lines and reflexive Jersey club gestures is to betray the core ethos of both. I’m willing to press on until the uncorked eruption of the final 20 seconds, but it ends up feeling less like a well-earned payoff than a rueful mourning of what could have been.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: This is aggressively stupid — three minutes of blistering eurodance revival with the bare minimum of vocal intervention. Each of the girls gets at least one glorious clunker of a line, delivered with the delusional confidence of someone who can absolutely get away with it. It sounds like a trailer for another, better song, complete with a gratuitous fake-out ending. Diplo is there, for some reason. In short, the platonic ideal of a Blackpink song.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: What…was I supposed to jump at? What point? Why the Gladiator reference? Why was Diplo part of this?? How did Rosé go from “On the Ground” to this?!
[0]

Alfred Soto: Often threatening to turn into power pop and rightfully so, “Jump” zigzags through tempo changes and one-word exhortations with the spritz I expect from Blackpink.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: I didn’t actually review Betta Lemme’s “Play” (also a “Meet Her at the Love Parade” sample) but I’d have given it a [5]. I did review Le Sserafim’s “Crazy” (not a “Meet Her at the Love Parade” sample, but close enough): an [8]. This, then, is a [7]. I’d factor in the other — and notably very recent — Blackpink solo singles as benchmarks too, but that’s a lot of variables to keep in my head.
[6]

Jel Bugle: Blackpink Eyed Peas
[5]

Will Adams: no thoughts just rave
[6]