Oh, BLACKPINK. What are we going to do with you? You’re K-pop’s eternal influencers, but you only grace us with new music every once in a blue moon. With more direct competitors emerging each year, I’m amazed how loyal fans have remained given such little return on their investment. We’ve been promised a BLACKPINK comeback next month (I’ll believe it when I see it), but for now we have their PUBG Mobile tie-in Ready For Love and its animated avatars of the girls.

Ready For Love has been kicking around for awhile now, though never available in its full form. It’s an oddly generic song, both by BLACKPINK and big gaming promo standards. The girls bring flavor to anything they record. Their voices are just too recognizable to get lost in generic production. But as a song, Ready For Love is a minor stopgap. We have all the known BLACKPINK hallmarks: strong vocal melodies, charismatic rap. But they’re wrapped in a song that, quite frankly, feels beneath a group of this caliber. Yes, it’s basically an OST. What can we really expect? The thing is, when you release as infrequently as BLACKPINK do, anything you record will be met with high expectations.

Ready For Love frames its beat-drop chorus with a catchy repetition of the titular phrase, bringing bite to an instrumental that feels faceless and oddly cheap. If you must craft your song around a central drop, the production had better be impactful and immaculately arranged. Ready For Love‘s drop simply limps along, aided by the girls but never able to become the dynamic focal point it needs to be. In the end, the track sounds like the holdover it is — not awful by any means, but nothing we haven’t heard a thousand times before.