How You Like That

The hook: a victory lap written from the bottom

Most people hear "How You Like That" as pure bravado. The drop hits like a car door slamming, the four members strut through palaces and ice caves, and the title phrase lands like a smirk. Easy to file it under "boastful girl-group banger" and move on.

The surprise is that the song begins in the dark. Before any of the swagger, the opening verses describe being low, being written off, being shut out from the light. The confidence that follows is not where the song starts; it is where the song arrives. That arc, from defeat to defiance, is the whole point, and it is why a track that dropped in the strange, stalled summer of 2020 became one of the defining pop moments of that year. People were not just dancing to it. They were borrowing its attitude to get through lockdown.

Background: a year of silence, then a record-breaking return

By mid-2020 BLACKPINK were already the biggest girl group on the planet, but they were also a group with a reputation for long waits between releases. Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa had debuted under YG Entertainment in 2016, and their releases arrived sparingly, often a year or more apart. Their previous big single, "Kill This Love", had come out in April 2019, the same month they became the first K-pop girl group to play Coachella. Fans, known as BLINKs, had spent more than a year asking when the next era would come.

The answer was "How You Like That", released on 26 June 2020 as the pre-release single for what would become their first full-length record, The Album, later that autumn. It was produced by YG's longtime hitmaker Teddy Park alongside R.Tee and 24, the same team that had shaped much of the group's sound since debut. Teddy also co-wrote the lyrics, reportedly with Danny Chung, keeping the familiar BLACKPINK formula of Korean verses laced with English hooks.

The timing was extraordinary. The pandemic had cancelled tours worldwide, and the group's plans for 2020 had reportedly been reshuffled more than once. Instead of a stadium launch, BLACKPINK launched into a global audience that was online, restless and hungry for spectacle. The music video premiere on YouTube drew a peak of well over a million concurrent viewers, a record at the time, and the clip racked up around 86 million views in its first 24 hours, another record. Guinness World Records later recognised the release with several titles. Within a day, it was clear the long wait had only sharpened the appetite.

For readers in the US and UK, there is a lovely detail here. Because the group could not fly to New York, they made their American TV debut of the song on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon from a set in Korea, beamed into US living rooms during a summer when late-night TV itself was being broadcast from hosts' homes. In Britain, the song climbed into the upper reaches of the Official Singles Chart, one of the strongest showings for a K-pop girl group in the UK up to that point. Three years later, in July 2023, BLACKPINK became the first Korean act to headline BST Hyde Park in London, and this was one of the songs that tens of thousands of British fans screamed back at them. The line from lockdown TV in 2020 to a London park in 2023 tells you how much this single helped widen the door.

Core meaning: falling, then flipping the script

Lyrically, the song moves in three clear stages.

The fall. The opening lines paint the narrator at her lowest point: left in the dark, ignored, treated as though she had no future. There is a real ache in these first moments, sung softly before the beat fully arrives. The speaker admits she was hurt and that someone (a lover, a rival, a doubting world, the song keeps it deliberately open) watched her stumble and assumed that was the end of the story.

The rise. Then the mood turns. The narrator describes picking herself up, looking up at the sky, and realising that being underestimated has given her fuel. Imagery of light breaking through and of climbing higher than before runs through this section. The point is not simply that she survived; it is that she has become stronger precisely because she was pushed down. The pain is converted into energy.

The taunt. Finally comes the title phrase, delivered as a cool, almost amused question to whoever doubted her. It is the sound of someone who does not need to shout. She lets her success do the talking and simply asks the doubter how they feel watching it. The rap verses from Jennie and Lisa push this into full bravado, full of confident boasts about style, status and unstoppability, while Rosé and Jisoo carry the more melodic, almost cinematic lift of the rise.

What makes the song clever is that its "revenge" is never cruel. Nobody gets destroyed. The narrator does not plot or scheme. Her retaliation is simply to shine, and to make sure the person who wrote her off has a front-row seat. That is a very old idea, living well as the best revenge, packaged in a very modern sound.

Musically, the structure mirrors this story. The verses are sparse and tense, the pre-chorus builds with rising synths, and the drop is not a sung chorus at all but a hard, brassy trap-EDM blast that lets the beat itself deliver the triumph. Then, near the end, the track flips into an entirely new, faster dance-break section, as if the narrator has become so powerful she has outgrown the song's own shape. That outro became one of the most copied dance moments of 2020.

The visuals: palaces, hanbok and a world audience

You cannot separate "How You Like That" from its music video, directed by Seo Hyun-seung, a long-time BLACKPINK collaborator. The clip moves through a series of grand, stylised sets: a dark, glowing chamber, a vast icy landscape, a moonlit temple courtyard and a sweeping palace staircase. Each member gets her own visual world, and the cuts are fast enough that the whole thing feels like a luxury fashion campaign crossed with an action trailer.

The detail that sparked the most conversation came in the final dance break, when the group appears in outfits inspired by hanbok, traditional Korean clothing, reworked into short, modern, stage-ready silhouettes. The designs were reportedly made by the Korean label Danha, whose orders were said to have jumped after the video landed. In Korea, the look prompted pride and debate in equal measure, with some celebrating it as a global showcase for Korean heritage and others discussing how far traditional dress should be modernised. Abroad, many viewers were seeing hanbok for the first time, and countless fans went searching to learn what it was. A pop video became an accidental cultural ambassador.

Cultural context and legacy

"How You Like That" arrived at a hinge point for K-pop in the West. BTS were about to release "Dynamite" a few weeks later, and the summer of 2020 became the moment when Korean pop stopped being treated as a niche curiosity by many Western outlets and started being treated as simply pop. BLACKPINK's single entered the US Billboard Hot 100 and became, for a time, one of the highest-charting songs by a K-pop girl group in America. Its video went on to pass a billion YouTube views, joining a club the group already dominated.

It also set up the most commercially ambitious stretch of the group's career. The Album followed in October 2020 with collaborations featuring Selena Gomez and Cardi B, after a summer track with Lady Gaga, "Sour Candy", had already been released. Then came Born Pink in 2022, the record-breaking world tour, the 2023 Coachella headline set (another first for an Asian act) and that Hyde Park show. In each of those concerts, "How You Like That" served as a reliable mid-set explosion, the song that made the stadium lights shake.

And the song has had a long afterlife as a dance challenge. The outro choreography, sharp and fast and just difficult enough to feel like an achievement, spread across TikTok and YouTube cover channels, from Seoul dance studios to school halls in Manchester and Ohio. In a year when almost nobody could gather, learning the routine in your bedroom became a way of joining a global crowd.

Why it still resonates today

Part of the song's staying power is simple: it still sounds enormous. The drop has not dated, and the outro still sends a jolt through any room.

But the deeper reason is that its emotional story is universal. Everyone has been underestimated. Everyone has had a stretch where it felt like the lights were off and the people around them had quietly decided they were finished. "How You Like That" gives that experience a soundtrack, and it insists that the low point is not the end but the launch pad. It does not ask you to be angry. It asks you to be undeniable.

There is also a poignancy in hindsight. In the years since, all four members have built solo careers that reached far beyond the group: Rosé's global smash with Bruno Mars, Lisa's acting turn in an acclaimed American drama series, Jennie and Jisoo's own record-breaking releases. The idea of four women who refused to be boxed in, who kept rising higher than expected, now reads less like a lyric and more like a career summary. When the group reunited for their 2025 world tour, including stadium dates in London and across the US, the song felt like a statement of continuity: still here, still rising, and still asking the doubters how they like it.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• The Album (BLACKPINK, 2020) — The full-length record that "How You Like That" was built to introduce. Hear it in context alongside "Lovesick Girls" and the Selena Gomez collaboration "Ice Cream", and you will notice how the single sets the confident, cinematic tone the rest of the album follows.
• Kill This Love (EP, 2019) — The release that came just before, and the clearest ancestor of this song's brass-heavy, battle-cry style. Listening to the two back to back shows how Teddy and the team refined the formula into something even sharper.
• Born Pink (BLACKPINK, 2022) — The follow-up era, led by "Pink Venom" and "Shut Down". It is fascinating to hear how the group pushed the swagger of 2020 into something more knowing and self-referential.

📚 Follow the story

• BLACKPINK: Light Up the Sky (Netflix documentary, 2020) — Released just a few months after the single, this film follows the members through trainee days, Coachella and the making of their biggest era. It is the best window into the pressure and ambition behind the song's comeback energy.
• BLACKPINK: The Movie (2021) — A concert film made to mark the group's fifth anniversary, built partly around their livestreamed shows. It captures how songs like this one became communal experiences when real-world concerts were impossible.
• Writing on the Korean Wave and the global rise of K-pop — Several journalists and academics have published accessible books on how Korean pop conquered the world. Pick one up to understand the system of training, production and fandom that made a release like this possible.

🌍 Visit the places

• Gyeongbokgung Palace, Seoul — The grand royal palace at the heart of Seoul echoes the regal staircase and courtyard imagery in the video. Visitors who wear hanbok can reportedly enter for free, which feels like a fitting tribute to the song's most talked-about outfits.
• Hyde Park, London — Where BLACKPINK made history in July 2023 as the first Korean act to headline BST. Strolling the park gives UK fans a tangible link to the night this song rang out across central London.
• Bukchon Hanok Village, Seoul — A preserved neighbourhood of traditional Korean houses, where rental hanbok shops line the streets. It is the closest you can get to stepping into the song's blend of heritage and modern swagger.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Learn the outro dance — Countless tutorial videos break down the famous final dance break move by move. Even mastering just the last thirty seconds will give you a newfound respect for how fast and precise the choreography really is.
• Take a K-pop dance class — Studios in London, New York, Los Angeles and many other cities run drop-in K-pop sessions, and this song is a regular on the syllabus. It is a fun, social way to feel the music in your body rather than just your headphones.
• Try on a modern hanbok — Some Korean fashion labels and cultural centres abroad offer hanbok fittings or events. Wearing one, even briefly, helps you understand why the video's reimagined outfits caused such a stir at home and overseas.

🎵 Listen to this song