How You Like That

The song

‘How You Like That’ is a single BLACKPINK released on 26 June 2020. At the time it stood alone, carrying one song; four months later, on 2 October, it opened their first album THE ALBUM.

Reviews

IZM’s Hwang Sun-eop pointed at the place where the structure had changed. Where the earlier songs ran rap, then vocal, then drop, he wrote, this one shrewdly moves the rap to the back and takes a vocal, drop, rap order, a change that is simple and still felt; and the hold the song takes, he added, comes from good melodic lines and a tightly packed flow.

The Singles Jukebox ran a multi-critic panel on 3 July. Wayne Weizhen Zhang wrote: “Hook, pre-chorus, and chorus all glide together seamlessly, working like parts of an engine.”

When THE ALBUM arrived in October the song was taken up again inside the album reviews. Rolling Stone’s Tim Chan wrote that “‘How You Like That’ starts off as a straight-up trap song, before the beat drops and it inexplicably and wonderfully spirals into a pulsating club track that leaves you catching your breath”. Consequence’s Hannah Zwick called it “the most classically BLACKPINK song on the record” and wrote: “The elastic beat doesn’t stop once it starts, and every line is delivered meticulously.” The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis gave its cry of “look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane” as his example of a throwaway aside anyone else would have built a whole chorus around.

Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz ranked the album’s eight songs on the day of release and placed this one seventh. “Months after the release of the single ‘How You Like That,’ it’s still all about that chorus,” he wrote: “bouncy, exuberant and deceptively simple, the hook crystallizes the best parts of Blackpink’s pop appeal.”

Numbers

Rolling Stone reported in its review of THE ALBUM that the song’s music video had broken the record for the most-viewed clip on YouTube within 24 hours of release. The same review noted that the record was taken again that September, when BTS released the video for ‘Dynamite’.