The stadium is packed, and the audience is having the night of its life. Every chorus is belted out by tens of thousands of fans. People are hugging strangers. At least one grown man is crying. Again and again he jumps to his feet and shouts out the name of the group’s most talismanic member.
That name begins with “L”, but it isn’t Liam Gallagher, and this is not Oasis at Croke Park. While the Britpop brawlers are preparing to rock Dublin, across the Irish Sea in London the K-pop band Blackpink are making history as the first Korean girl group to headline Wembley Stadium, where they’re playing on Friday and Saturday.
I’m here with my daughter, and judging by the Blackpink merch on parade in the departure lounge at Heathrow a few days later, we are not the only Irish people making the trip.
Blackpink are about as big as a pop group can be in 2025, but for those not au fait with their bulldozing mash-up of pop and rap, they remain obscure. When I told a few people I was skipping Oasis to go to Blackpink, the response was along the lines of “Who?”, which is not something typically heard about a group with 40 billion streams and more than 20 million album sales.
RM Block
To their fans they are the biggest thing in music in 2025. That includes a guy in his 30s seated beside us, who spends most of the two-and-a-half-hour concert on his feet, roaring “Lissaaaaaa!” in the direction of Lalisa Manobal, aka the singer and rapper Lisa. (His girlfriend takes it all in dignified silence.)
He is also shaking an €80 “heart axe”, a chunky hunk of merchandise shaped like a hammer, and featuring light-up hearts, that is part of the Blackpink live experience.
Blackpink go in for musical maximalism: everything is dialled up to the red zone. If you think take-no-prisoners pop is one of 21st-century humanity’s great achievements, it’s irresistible.
Blending East Asian and western influences, songs such as Kill This Love and How You Like That cheerily pummel the listener into submission. They’re like mini pop operas, splicing hip-hop and Charli XCX-style hyperpop and conjuring the zesty punch of a thumping Bollywood soundtrack and the pulsating energy of the best production-line chart music.
Unlike Oasis, this is also a band of equals: it may be Lisa (recently seen playing a maid in the third season of The White Lotus) who has the guy next to us on his feet, but the band are fuelled by the interplay between Manobal and her bandmates Jennie, Jisoo and Rosé (who collaborated with Bruno Mars on the irresistible APT).
There are some surprises, too: at one point Rosé is filmed shuffling along the tunnel beneath the ramp, where she bumps into the singer FKA Twigs, who seems to be imprisoned there.
[ Oasis weekend in pictures: Liam and Noel Gallagher gave fans two joyous gigsOpens in new window ]
The exuberant response to the concert must also be seen in the context of the popularity of KPop Demon Hunters, the Netflix cartoon about a Blackpink-style group fighting demons – it’s a pretty literal title – that is on course to be the year’s most-watched animated series.
Above all, though, it’s the sheer energy that is most striking, especially during Jump, their house banger, a tune so great that Blackpink perform it twice. Give me two and a half hours of future-facing cyberpop over Oasis and their boozy, cash-grab nostalgia any day of the week.
