While millions of people happily rejoiced at the arrival of ROSÉ’s solo album Races, released on December 6th, the music criticism blog Pitchfork welcomed the project with lukewarm enthusiasm.
Writer Alex Ramos gave the album a mild 5.5 rating, but their review was anything but, charging that it “leans on outdated references and barely sketched angst.”
The project, they said, fails to maintain the grandeur of a heartbreak magnum opus and above all to promise intimacy, to give fans a deeper look at who she really is, outside of her BLACKPINK career — a promise that she herself did in an Instagram post.
“Rosie – is the name I let my friends and family call me,” she wrote in October, when she announced the project.
“With this album, I hope you all feel much closer to me.”
While Rosie sees the singer try her hand at a kaleidoscope of genres, from synth-pop to R&B (which according to the critic channels the styles of a not too distant era, around the years of Taylor Swift 1989, Halsey’s Badlandsor Sam Smith’s In the lonely hourRamos feels that the album fails to capture the nostalgia of the era and, worse yet, fails to bring anything new to the table.
“Even with the support of a major label, a star-studded songwriter and producer committee, and Rosé’s eight years of experience in BLACKPINK, Rosie offers nothing revelatory or exciting,” Ramos wrote.
“His writing pales in comparison to the canon of great breakup albums, with lines like, ‘In our desert, all our tears turned to dust/Now roses don’t grow here.’”
In deciding to write the definitive album, the writer claims, Rosé committed herself to giving listeners the heart of the matter, to feel uncomfortable and True, everything they felt, she didn’t.
Instead, Ramos says the project served to leave BLACKPINK fans out in the “cold,” bringing only “dated pop references and a generic feeling of lingering angst.”
