CHESHIRE

The record

CHESHIRE is ITZY’s sixth mini album, released on 30 November 2022 with four tracks. The title track carries the album’s name. It came four months after CHECKMATE.

The album introduction on Bugs says the title track carries the message that among a great many puzzling questions there is no fixed answer, so trust your own feeling, and describes it as a dance-pop track built on a piano riff and a bass sound. By the same text the record also carries the English single Boys Like You, released ahead of it on 21 October, and a song that samples Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’. The introduction says the music video was staged as a quiz show.

Reviews

NME’s Gladys Yeo reviewed the record a week after release. The deck read: “On their latest mini-album, K-pop’s most confident girl group tease a mature new sound and a bold, playful approach to romance”.

Of the title track she wrote that “with its darker, more subdued instrumentation, ‘Cheshire’ is worlds apart from its predecessor ‘Sneakers’”. On the lyrics: “On ‘Cheshire’, ITZY become active players in the game of love, pushing and pulling the subject of their affections to fulfil their every whim and fancy.”

IZM’s Im Dong-yeop reviewed the single around the same time. “The part to listen for is the singing,” he wrote, and: “where the voices used to support the music from behind the rhythm in a light tone, here a thick, firm tone leads the song.” The same piece read that change as a good one in the sense of hearing music that belongs to ITZY alone.

AllMusic’s Neil Z. Yeung noted the record as one “adding four more songs to their catalog”, and named its contents as “the popping title track and the throwback dance-pop anthem ‘Boys Like You’”.

Among the tracks

The song NME calls the record’s high point is the second track, ‘Snowy’. Yeo wrote that “the clear standout of the mini-album, ‘Snowy’ takes the teasing tone of ‘Cheshire’ to the next level”.

She set out how it is made: “ITZY hops onto K-pop’s 2022 trend of sampling classical pieces in this track, which borrows from Beethoven’s ‘Für Elise’. The familiar melody combines with a keyboard instrumental that emulates the sound of twinkling bells and nods to the upcoming holiday season, all while instilling a dark, unsettling atmosphere.” Her closing line on it: “Wintry and fantastical yet creepily charismatic, this B-side could well be the theme song of a Nightmare Before Christmas reboot.”

The album introduction says the four tracks move between pop with punk elements and classical sampling, and that all of them share lyrics written from a self-possessed, direct point of view.

Numbers

AllMusic records that on release the mini album “topped the South Korean charts and entered the Billboard 200 at number 25”.

The following year’s KILL MY DOUBT album introduction says this record followed CHECKMATE as a second consecutive million-seller. By the same text the group were on their first world tour through this period, and that tour closed in April 2023 at twenty shows across sixteen places.