SQUARE UP

The record

SQUARE UP is BLACKPINK’s first mini album, released on 15 June 2018 with four tracks. The title track is ‘뚜두뚜두 (DDU-DU DDU-DU)’. YG Entertainment’s album introduction presents it as the first mini album after SQUARE ONE, SQUARE TWO and ‘AS IF IT’S YOUR LAST’.

Reviews

IZM’s Hwang Sun-eop built his review around the arrangement of the title track. He called it a song with a great many routes of attack, and wrote that an ordinary trap beat, assisted by a synthesiser in a scale with a Korean-pop lilt to it, scores from unexpected positions, while the backing changes its formation bar by bar — no sooner has one player looked like the striker than another breaks through — and threatens the listener’s eardrums. Because of that, he added, the song feels as though nothing repeats from start to finish, and the sense that makes its peak out of a drop on the sticky-sounding phrase ddu-du ddu-du is outstanding.

Idology (아이돌로지) took the record in its new-releases column on 2 July. Mano wrote that the coexistence of two temperaments that ought not to be able to coexist — the pretty and the savage — is precisely this group’s identity, and that the mini album both declares it and proves it bodily. Mimyo said the record sounds like the essence of a YG-style pop that the label had held on to without often getting the chance to show it plainly, and that the pleasure of the moment before the chorus, when what seemed a very sweet reversal turns out to have been a component of the sharp trap beat all along, is beyond saying. Oyo wrote that although he would personally have liked the bass more aggressive and dirtier, the song is still, exactly as its lyrics declare, the summer’s certain banger; Cho Eun-jae called the record a mini album announcing that a new victor had arrived in the K-pop scene.

The Singles Jukebox ran a multi-critic panel on ‘DDU-DU DDU-DU’ on 11 July. John Seroff gave it a “bonus point for a luxurious and gonzo video that features a disco ball tank and a fennec fox”, and Alfred Soto wrote: “There’s enough going on rhythmically to threaten my woofers, and the drops surprise me.”

Among the tracks

‘DDU-DU DDU-DU’ returned to an IZM list four years later. Writing its entry in ‘K-pop dance tracks you should remember from after 2010’ in October 2022, Kim Ho-hyun called it a textbook dance track from which one can learn what happens when an act’s own appeal and a song’s concept line up, and said that a tightly worked, dramatic arrangement and a sharp rap that keeps its groove hold up an addictive dance riding over an Eastern scale.

The one other track singled out by name is ‘Forever Young’. Idology’s Mano urged readers not to miss it, for its brisk clarity and for the run from about the three-minute mark where the song’s structure is twisted slightly.