JENNIE Headlines Lollapalooza — A Historic Set That Leaned Too Hard on the Unknown
Jennie closed Lollapalooza's Bud Light Stage at 8:55 p.m. Saturday, becoming the first Korean female solo artist to headline the festival. Eighteen songs in, four of them were tracks the crowd had never heard before.
That's the tension of the set: Jennie earned the slot, and the hits proved it. "Filter" and "Damn Right" opened with the kind of confidence a closing act needs, and by the time she got to "like JENNIE" and "Mantra," the crowd - thinner than the historic billing might suggest, since she was scheduled directly against Grammy Best New Artist Olivia Dean on another stage - was fully hers. "Less Than a Lover," released just eight days before the show, already had enough of a following to turn into a genuine singalong. "ExtraL" and "Starlight" closed the night the way a headline set is supposed to close: loud, certain, over quickly.
The middle stretch is where the set asked more of the audience than a festival crowd is built to give. Four unreleased songs - "Sweet Tooth," "Fallen Angel," "Lock It Down" and "Heaven" - took up a real chunk of the hour, with lyrics projected onscreen so people could follow along with music they'd never encountered. The front rows, the ones who'd clearly memorized the leaked snippets already, ate it up. Everyone standing further back had less to hold onto. It's a defensible artistic choice for an artist who's said she still has more of the "Ruby" era to give the world, but it's also the reason the momentum dipped right when a headline set most needs to hold a crowd that's choosing between stages.
This review draws on the Chicago Sun-Times' on-site account and released fan trackings of the setlist, not a firsthand viewing - a distinction worth stating plainly, since a review built from footage and other critics' reporting can catch what the setlist covered and what the local press reported about crowd energy, but not the texture of standing in Grant Park watching it happen. The Sun-Times critic, who was there, described the crowd near the Bud Light Stage thinning out during the run of new material - a detail that matches what the released setlist alone can't tell you.
What the set did resolve, definitively, is the question of whether solo Jennie can hold a headline slot on merit. She can. "Ruby" gave her three Hot 100 entries and a spot on Rolling Stone's albums-of-2025 list, and the version of those songs performed Saturday - reworked slightly for the stage, backed by a full band arrangement rather than the album's production - sounded like the work of an artist who's outgrown "member of BLACKPINK" as her primary description. The unresolved question is timing: four new songs, all still unreleased, performed to a festival crowd that had no way to prepare for them. Whether "Sweet Tooth" and "Heaven" land the same way once they have official releases and radio play behind them is a different test than whether they landed at Lollapalooza.
Jennie's summer isn't over. She heads to Tokyo and Osaka for Summer Sonic later this month, and by then at least some of Saturday's unknowns may not be unknowns anymore.
Jennie's debut album "Ruby" is out now via Odd Atelier/Columbia Records. She performs at Summer Sonic in Tokyo and Osaka later this month.
