BLACKPINK – Boombayah

YG Entertainment is a Seoul-based K-pop behemoth so ruthlessly successful it’s emerging talent roster is picked over in the financial pages of the Korean press. So naturally, when the company’s most successful girl band 2NE1 went on hiatus earlier this year, YE CEO Yang Hyun Suk had a replacement girl band ready to roll out within weeks. Blackpink are an edgier proposition than their more clean-cut predecessors. (One fresh-faced young singer here claims, rather implausibly, to have drunk “a bottle full of Henny”.) But the public are lapping it up. Within hours of launching this on Monday, the band had racked up millions of YouTube views and their debut album Square One shot to No 1 in 14 Far East countries.

cr. Irish Times