Blackpink meets One Direction…
[Video]
[3.00]
Joshua Lu: Two members of bigger acts whose solo careers could be best described as “extant” join forces on a song so boring it’s hardly worth the internet bandwidth to blurb. Jisoo’s trajectory is just part of a larger trend of Blackpink members turning to adult contemporary collaboration slop for minimal gain (Rosé with Alex Warren, Lisa with Maroon 5); Zayn’s been in this trench for almost a decade.
[3]
Julian Axelrod: I’m on record as being both a Jisoo girl and a Zayn girl (I would link to my Tumblr messages from high school here if I could) but even I can’t get too worked up over this collab. It feels like we’ve done the “I’m like this but you’re like this so we could never work out… unless?” duet so many times it’s lost all impact, and neither principal artist has enough of a clearly defined public personality in 2025 to fill in the lyrical gaps. But most importantly, we need to keep this song far away from Nick and Vanessa Lachey before they turn the line “We should fall in love with our eyes closed” into a six-month Netflix blindfold dating experiment.
[4]
Alfred Soto: If you fall in love with your eyes closed, you might step on a rake!
[3]
Al Varela: Is Zayn just incapable of having a good duet with a female vocalist? Jisoo sounds so out of place on this. Whatever vocal filter they put on her sounds awful. This is pop industry slop if I’ve ever heard it. The Blackpink Experiment was a complete failure.
[2]
Ian Mathers: God, the lyrics for this are so incredibly clunky. Normally that’s mitigated by them sounding good in practice even if they thud a little when you try and parse them separately from the music. But this is such a plodding nonentity of a song that they don’t soar there either.
[3]
Iain Mew: There are some pretty details in the burbling keyboard noises in there somewhere. Unfortunately the main priority of everything else appears to have been to fill up all available space to the fullest extent, with little mind paid as to what effect. What little individuality either singer might have brought to their vocals is completely smothered. The directionlessness is almost eerie, too total for generic to even work as a descriptor.
[2]
Nortey Dowuona: Isaiah Tejada and Jordan Johnson and Stefan Johnson: what happened with these keyboards? Isaiah, don’t try to throw the others under the bus. Jordan, don’t try to take all the blame on yourself. Stefan, you cannot complain about divided attention just because Nico Aranda and Alex Hope both handled the guitar — all of you working together on these drums and keyboards mean you would all notice and fix each other’s mistakes. Isaiah, since you and Alex were meant to take all the credit for the work, now the both of you have to go back in and fix these keyboards. Alex will help you if you feel a little stuck, and so will Amanda Ibanez, in case the vocal arrangement needs tweaking as well. The rest of you will wait in the other studio and work with Jisoo on another song. I expect you to have a chorus, bridge and a second verse by the time I get back.
[4]
Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Like when you’re asleep, right?
[3]
I thought I would like this at first, but the longer I listened, the more it all just melded together into a big wad of noise. Can you wad up noise? This is a noisewad if I’ve ever heard one. [4]