While millions gleefully rejoiced the arrival of ROSÉ's solo album rosie, released December 6, music criticism blog Pitchfork received the project with tepid enthusiasm.
Writer Alex Ramos granted the album a meek 5.5 score while their review was anything but, with accusations that it "leans on outdated references and thinly sketched heartache."
The project, they said, fails to deliver on her grandeurs of a heartbreak magnum opus and especially on promises of intimacy, on giving fans a deeper look at who she really is, outside of her BLACKPINK career — a promise that she herself made in an Instagram post.
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"Rosie - is the name I allow my friends and family to call me," she wrote in October, as she announced the project.
"With this album, I hope you all feel that much closer to me."
While rosie sees the singer try her hand at a kaleidoscope of genres, from synth-pop to R&B (which the critic says channels the styles of a not-too-distant time, circa Taylor Swift's 1989, Halsey's Badlands, or Sam Smith's In the Lonely Hour, Ramos feels the album fails to capture the nostalgia of the era and worse, fails to bring anything novel to the table.
"Even with the support of a major label, a star-studded committee of songwriters and producers, and Rosé's eight years of experience in BLACKPINK, rosie offers nothing revealing or exciting," Ramos wrote.
"Its writing pales in comparison to the canon of great breakup albums, with lines like, 'In the desert of us, all our tears turned to dust/Now the roses don't grow here.'"
In setting out to write the ultimate heartbreak album, the writer contends, Rosé pledged to give listeners the nitty-gritty, to get uncomfortable, and real, all of which they felt, she did not.
Instead, Ramos asserts that the project served to leave BLACKPINK fans in the "cold," bringing only "dated pop references and a generic feeling of lingering heartache."
