Jennie’s to-do list is growing by the minute. For the last year, the pop star has been so consumed with the launch of her own label and arrival of her highly anticipated solo debut album — plus, now, the impending reunion of Blackpink, the globally renowned K-pop quartet she is part of — that she hasn’t had a moment to envision her ideal release-night party. That is, if she even has time for one. “I like planning parties. I like creating an album,” Jennie says. “It’s fun, but sometimes it gets hard. I’m just trying to make sure everything is perfectly done.” Sitting on a cozy couch in a small back room of a photo studio in Seoul’s Gangnam district, Jennie’s post-shoot look on this late-October afternoon calls to mind Gossip Girl “It” mom Lily van der Woodsen after a particularly tiring day. Leaning back in matching black pants and zip-up hoodie after hours spent staring at a camera, Jennie slides on a pair of dark-lensed Gentle Monster sunglasses to give her eyes, and perhaps herself, a bit of a break. (She partnered with the eyewear brand in April 2024 on her own line, Jentle Salon.) The 28-year-old appears at ease despite the chaos swirling around her. She’s also strikingly self-aware, which seems to be both freeing and consuming for her — she knows the pursuit of perfection is exhausting and never-ending, and yet she’ll settle for nothing less. Recently, this has manifested in the secrecy surrounding her upcoming album, which for the self-described “workaholic” is far from manufactured marketing mystique. Rather, it may well be a way to buy time until she feels the project she has dreamed of for so long is as close to perfect as possible — even as pressure to release it builds. “It’s not nice to be someone who’s always like, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t say anything,’ ” she says of the album she began working on in early 2024 — and that the world still knows very little about. “I want to say I’m almost there,” she offers. One of her biggest takeaways from the process? “I’m just going to say, ‘I don’t do well with time,’ ” she says with a laugh. Jacquemus top and AREA hat. Songyi Yoon Since Jennie became a YG Entertainment trainee at 14 and a Blackpink member at 20, her career has been clearly defined and carefully handled — a meticulous approach that has yielded historic results and global fame. In 2019, Blackpink became the first K-pop girl group to perform at Coachella, and just four years later, the first Asian act to headline the festival. And the group — rounded out by Lisa, Rosé and Jisoo — made history in 2022 as the first South Korean girl group to top the Billboard 200, with its celebrated second album, Born Pink. Yet that well-paved path to stardom also offered Jennie little time to explore her own creative voice. From Blackpink’s 2016 debut through 2023, she released just two solo singles, both through the group’s label, YG: the aptly titled Korean-English “Solo” in 2018 and the dance-pop “You & Me” in 2023, the latter of which peaked at No. 1 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart. All the while, Jennie was growing eager to piece together “the puzzle of my dreams,” as she calls her solo-album-to-be. So in 2023, when Blackpink re-signed with YG for group activities and its members became free agents for the first time in their careers for solo activities, she jumped at the chance. “While I was on my last Blackpink tour [it wrapped in 2023], I couldn’t stop myself from starting to plan ahead. I’m just like that,” she says. “I listed out the things that I want in my life and started pinpointing, or prioritizing, what’s my very next step. And instantly, I was like, ‘I still haven’t accomplished the dream of releasing a solo album.’ I wanted to satisfy myself by achieving that goal.” With a clear runway, she set out to do just that. In December 2023, she announced her own independent label, OddAtelier (commonly referred to as OA). At the start of 2024, she began her “album journey” in Los Angeles, where she says she worked on “99%” of the project, whose title has yet to be unveiled. By September, she announced a partnership with Columbia Records, and in October, she released the album’s fierce and sassy lead single, “Mantra,” which peaked at Nos. 2 and 3 on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. and Billboard Global 200 charts, respectively. “It’s been a long process because American artists, they usually take a few years to make one album, but we have time limitations because [this year] she’s got to go back into Blackpink activities again,” says Alison Chang, OA’s head of global business and Jennie’s self-described “right hand.” “She really wanted to show her artistry through this album, and in the beginning, we were meeting producers and writers who she didn’t really match with. I think finding her sound throughout this process was kind of hard, and landing with ‘Mantra,’ that took a very long time. Just finding that first perfect single to let the world know this is the start of her solo career.” And while Jennie’s years as a trainee prepared her for nearly every aspect of stardom, nothing could have braced her for the pressure and responsibility that comes with being truly in charge. “The thing is, even back in the [trainee] days, I was never OK with what other people approved. I would check on every single team like, ‘Can I look at other options?’ ” she recalls. “So I am used to the process, but it’s more of a mental thing. The idea of ‘you’re on your own, make the right decision.’ And sometimes that’s the scariest feeling. Sometimes I wake up like, ‘I don’t want this overwhelming control.’ ” “Just touched down in L.A.,” Jennie sings on “Mantra,” later noting, “We’ll be 20 minutes late ’cause we had to do an In-N-Out drive-by” — and
