마지막처럼 (AS IF IT'S YOUR LAST)

The song

‘AS IF IT’S YOUR LAST’ is a single BLACKPINK released on 22 June 2017, carrying one song. It was their first new material since SQUARE TWO in November 2016. YG Entertainment’s album introduction calls it the fastest song they had put out to that point and a record pitched at the summer.

Reviews

IZM’s Jung Min-jae singled out the chorus. Writing of a chorus that reaches for the retro, he said that unlike the verse and bridge, which are dressed in the present, a refrain recalling 1980s synth-pop is what drives the song’s hold on the listener — attractive enough, he added, to set the argument about originality aside for a moment.

Idology (아이돌로지) took the song in its new-releases column on 18 July. Randy called it a bright, lively, decent club tune, and wrote that the synth shadowing the vocal melody in the same scale right through the chorus even suggests a karaoke backing, which works to thin out the dark, heavy feeling the group’s dance songs had carried until then. Haemchwa, in the same column, called it catchy and cheerful and closed by saying there are few better dance songs for a single summer.

The Singles Jukebox ran a multi-critic panel on 14 July. Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote: “That verse is bombastic, a sped-up dem bow rhythm with whirring synths that sounds like YG’s take on ‘Pon de Floor’ and it segues ever so cleanly into country pastiche.” Thomas Inskeep wrote that “the chorus, which seems to come out of nowhere and is nothing like what comes before or after it, sounds like a fusion of the best of Kylie Minogue and Taylor Dayne, both circa 1987. And the verses are delightfully weird, too. This is Frankenstein pop that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.” Alex Clifton wrote that “it’s the most saccharine thing we’ve got so far from Blackpink (to go along with the ‘Pink’ concept of the band) and they make it joyously infectious. I love hearing when people have fun with their music; this is one of those times.”

The chorus

Three of the pages point at the same place. IZM read the refrain as 1980s synth-pop and The Singles Jukebox’s Inskeep as pop of about 1987, while Idology’s Randy wrote that the synth attached to it thins the dark, heavy impression of the earlier songs. What all three say in common is that the verse and the chorus draw on the sounds of different decades.