Ice Cream (with Selena Gomez)

The song

‘Ice Cream’ is a single BLACKPINK released with the American singer Selena Gomez on 28 August 2020. At the time it stood alone, carrying one song, and it followed How You Like That as the second release put out ahead of their first album THE ALBUM. Five weeks later it was carried again as that record’s second track.

Reviews

The Singles Jukebox ran a multi-critic panel on 25 September. Alfred Soto wrote that “this compendium of secondhand pleasures is irresistible”, and Michael Hong that “it doesn’t beat you over the head with a gaudy hook, but it hooks you in all the same with its coyness”.

When THE ALBUM arrived in October the song was taken up again inside the album reviews. Rolling Stone’s Tim Chan wrote that “the Selena Gomez-featuring ‘Ice Cream’ is a shimmery pop confection that’s as delicious as its title suggests”. Picking out the album’s quick production touches, the Guardian’s Alexis Petridis named “the woozy-sounding staccato synths that open Ice Cream”. IZM’s Jang Jun-hwan read the song as the place where the record’s strategy for markets outside Korea shows itself, writing that the approach comes out clearly in the catchy melodic line and level pop grammar of ‘Ice Cream’, with Selena Gomez, and of ‘Bet You Wanna’, with Cardi B.

The collaboration

Billboard’s Jason Lipshutz, ranking the album’s eight songs on the day of release, placed this one fifth and made the collaboration itself the subject. “On the album’s second single, Blackpink finds euphoria alongside Selena Gomez: both the quartet and the pop superstar sound downright giddy on the track, packing in the sugary metaphors and winking hard over the loping beat,” he wrote. “The result is a work of unrepentant joy, as the collaboration invites fans to join in on the cross-continent ice cream social.”