Diplo on How a Song Written for Major Lazer Became BLACKPINK’s ‘Jump’: ‘They Wanted to Do Something That Shocks People’

This week, BLACKPINK’s “Jump” debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Global 200 and Billboard Global Excl. U.S. charts — making it, statistically, the biggest song in the world.

But the K-pop superstars almost didn’t get the chance to record it, with the song reaching the group after a circuitous journey that started when it was originally written by, and for, Major Lazer.

“Then we didn’t release it,” says Major Lazer’s de facto leader Diplo. “And thank God.”

The origins of “Jump” go back to January 2024, when it came into being during a writing session at Sony Studios in Miami with Diplo, Major Lazer’s Ape Drums and Argentine producer Zecca, who’s worked extensively with Bzrp, including on his 2023 juggernaut “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. #53.” While they were in the session to write Latin music, Diplo also wanted to make a song in the vein of early-’00s electroclash heroes Fischerspooner.

“[I thought] it’d be like an ‘Emerge’ kind of acid song, and Major Lazer would do it, and I’d put a vocal on it, and it’d be fun and happy and we’d find a way to make it work” he says. But via Diplo, the song then landed with Argentinian duo Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, who worked with Diplo on arranging it, then recorded it.

Then still relatively unknown in the U.S., the pair blew up not long after working on the song, a rise in part fueled by their October 2024 Tiny Desk Concert, which now has 39 million views. “The show they did for NPR went viral, and they had a sound that’s kind of jazz, Latin and Moroccan, so then the song [we did] didn’t make sense for them,” Diplo says.

By this point, the song was already a year old, but Diplo would not be thwarted. “I was courting a lot of people and just kept writing,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to make this f–king idea work. I’m going to take this to the finish line, no matter how hard it is.” He was still contemplating releasing it as a Major Lazer song, calling the group an outlet where “if my crazy music doesn’t find a home, it’s going to be released on a Major Lazer album.”

But kismet interceded when Diplo found himself in the studio with Teddy Park, who’s written dozens of hits for K-Pop acts including 2NE1 and BigBang, and who is the creative director and lead producer for BLACKPINK. “I played him a bunch of stuff that I thought was interesting,” recalls Diplo, “He was like, ‘Cool.’ Then I was about to leave and I pulled this song up. I was like, ‘This is probably the craziest thing I have that could maybe work.’ He was like, ‘That’s the perfect idea. This is what we need to do — something this radical.'”

The song is kind of a weird one, swerving through moments of techno, drill, hardstyle, Eurodance and trance with a chorus melody that evokes the 1997 rave anthem “Meet Her at the Loveparade” by German producer Da Hool. It’s also a song that might not necessarily catch your attention from the start (if you’re not already a BLACKPINK fan, that is), but makes so many inventive shifts that it ultimately demands your attention. Drawing from myriad dance/electronic subgenres, it’s also essentially a club track — and Diplo’s latest venture in juicing up mainstream pop with electronic sounds not widely known in the mainstream.

“I would say it’s speed, garage and trance, and the bass line of the drops is almost like Goa trance,” says Diplo. “It goes into drill and Jersey Club. The fill is from a Brazilian genre called from Bahia. The outro is like hard techno, and the beginning drums are more Euro-pop from the ’90s, with the guitar line and the whistle.”

Having worked with some of the biggest pop acts in the world, he says with authority that such hybridizing would be swiftly rejected by most major artists. But with a predilection for risk taking among K-pop generally and BLACKPINK specifically — along with a famously devoted fanbase that celebrates and elevates most anything the group does — the song had finally landed with the right act.

“If I said to like, Adele, that ‘Hey I’ve got this trance/Jersey Club song… That’s already off limits for somebody like that,” says Diplo. “This was so fun because they’re like, ‘We just want to do something that shocks people, and we don’t care if it’s different.”

Diplo passed the track to Park and BLACKPINK in May, and they released the song and its high-concept video on July 11, with “Jump” being the group’s first new single in three years. He briefly connected with BLACKPINK’s JENNIE (whose 2025 album single “like JENNIE” he co-wrote and co-produced) while the group was recording the song when she FaceTimed him one night while he was in Bulgaria (“or some place like that,” he says), but the connection was bad, so ultimately he didn’t hear the song again until the group finished cutting it, sent him the files and he did the finishing touches.

In its final form, the song now has writing credits from Diplo, Ape Drums, Zecca, TEDDY, South Korean producer and frequent BLACKPINK collaborator 24, Swedish artist Zikai, British singer/songwriter Claudia Valentina, German producer Jumpa, vocalist/writer/producer Malachiii (widely known for his vocals on his Adam Port and Strv collab “Move”) and singer/songwriter Jesse Bluu. Its production credits go to 24, TEDDY and Diplo.

If there was any sort of grand plan in all of this, it’s that Diplo says he intentionally stepped back from touring as heavily this year in order to re-focus on writing and producing music, finding that the house scene he’s been heavily DJing in for years has, for him, gone stale. 

“House music is a genre that’s on a loop that just became a contest of bottles and tables and cover songs,” he says. “The main part of the house music industry is to make this sound and situation as comfortable as possible for older, rich people to kind of enjoy a dip into underground culture.”

Having occasionally revamped the sound of pop music over the years — pulling Justin Bieber‘s career off life support with “Where Are Ü Now,” the 2015 collab with the singer and Skrillex (as part of the producers’ Jack Ü project), injecting Major Lazer’s woozy dancehall into worldwide earholes by giving it to Beyoncé as a sample for 2011’s “Run the World (Girls),” putting house into the pop realm with the 2018 Dua Lipa collab “Electricity” via his and Mark Ronson’s Silk City project — he was motivated to just try and do that again.

With “Jump” now dominating charts and streamers, he now seems convinced of his efficacy. “I feel like ‘Jump’ sounds like a song from 2026 or something,” he says. “It’s 2025, but if you look at the charts, every song sounds like a rehashed version of like, an A&R’s dream of what’s interesting.Music should go back to ‘Let’s shock people.’ I think this song does that, and that’s why it’s gotten a reaction like it has.”

Though “Jump” ventures across multiple styles in its two-minute, 45 second duration, the most in-vogue moments are the chorus and outro. Thumping techno drums roll in alongside the stabbing synth lead, which nods to the fashionable sound of the decade’s preferred flavor of techno, currently spearheaded by the likes of Charlotte de Witte and Sara Landry. These producers, and more in their realm of the scene, are pulling in entire festival crowds with this sound — BLACKPINK could be therefore reaching new audiences with “Jump,” while bringing new audiences to techno. 

“My sole goal as a producer is to destroy all genres,” Diplo concludes. “Just to kill them all and mix everything that people don’t allow, or push the limits and do genres I shouldn’t be allowed to do. That’s been my whole M.O. since I started music, being the enemy for journalists and even audiences who are confused all the time by what I release.

“But that’s what K-pop is. If you listen to some old BLACKPINK, old BTS or ATEEZ, they’re going to put six genres in a song. They don’t give a f–k.”