Blackpink’s Jennie released ‘Less Than a Lover,’ a summer single she wrote and directed the video for, out now via OddAtelier/Columbia
Jennie has spent the last two years proving she is not just a member of the biggest girl group in the world. “Less Than a Lover,” out now via OddAtelier/Columbia Records, is the quietest argument she has made yet. The Blackpink singer wrote the song herself and directed its music video, and the result is soft where her solo work has often been sharp: lo-fi guitar textures, vintage electric keyboards, and a vocal that sounds like it was recorded close to the microphone in an empty room.
The subject is the space between things. The song sits inside a relationship that never quite resolves into either friendship or romance, and Jennie keeps it there rather than pushing it toward a conclusion. “It’s more than lust, it’s just enough,” she sings. “And all I want this summer is a little bit less than a lover. Need a little bit less than a lover. You get a little bit more than another.” It is an ode to summer that understands summer is temporary, which is a more interesting place to write from than most seasonal singles bother with.
She Made This One Herself
The credits are the story. Jennie wrote the track, contributed to its music, and directed the video based on her own story. That level of involvement marks a shift from an artist who has spent most of her career inside other people’s systems, and the video reflects it. She plays a version of herself shooting a short film with friends, opposite Taiwanese model Kai, and the fictional romance on set gradually bleeds into the real dynamic between them. The line between performance and feeling stops holding. For a song about an undefined connection, building the visual around that exact ambiguity is a genuinely elegant choice.
The rollout was patient. Jennie first previewed the song during her headlining set at Governors Ball in New York in June, then brought it to Mad Cool in Spain and other festival stages before releasing anything. The teaser image, captioned “the summer I chose to pause the love story,” drew more than 1.7 million likes on Instagram, and a TikTok teaser posted this week sent fans into the usual frenzy over her chemistry with Kai. Not everyone was won over. One K-pop critic called the track pleasant but unremarkable, arguing its gentle strum would offend no one, which is a fair reading of a record this deliberately understated.
A Solo Career With Its Own Infrastructure
Context makes the modesty of “Less Than a Lover” more striking. Jennie released Ruby, her 15-track debut solo album, last March through Odd Atelier, the label she founded, with guests including Childish Gambino, Doechii, Dua Lipa, Kali Uchis, Dominic Fike, and FKJ. That record was a statement of range and reach. This is the opposite move, a single with almost nothing on it, released a year and a half later by an artist who no longer needs to prove she can assemble a room full of stars.
In between, she reunited with Blackpink for the Deadline world tour and the group’s February EP of the same name, which included the comeback single “Jump.” The balance she has struck, group commitments and a solo catalogue built on her own imprint, is unusual in K-pop and increasingly the model younger artists point to.
She headlines Lollapalooza in Chicago later this month and makes her first appearance at Summer Sonic in Japan in August. “Less Than a Lover” will sound different in a festival field than it does in headphones, which may be the point. Some songs are built to fill stadiums. This one is built to follow you out of one.
