CRAZY IN LOVE

The record

CRAZY IN LOVE is ITZY’s first full-length album, released on 24 September 2021 with ten tracks. The title track is ‘LOCO’. It came five months after GUESS WHO, two years and seven months after the group’s debut.

The album introduction on Bugs says ‘LOCO’ is the other word for “crazy”, from the Latin, and that the record puts the state of being swept up by love into a sound that runs. By the same text the writing team GALACTIKA, who made ‘달라달라’ (Dalla Dalla) and ‘WANNABE’, worked with the group for a third time, folding Latin dance, moombahton and trap into the fusion groove that is their own mark. The introduction counts the release at sixteen tracks in all: nine new songs, instrumentals of the group’s best-known singles, and an English-language version of the title track.

Reviews

IZM’s Kim Seong-yeop reviewed the album in October 2021. He wrote that the record “joins hands again with GALACTIKA, who gave the group ‘달라달라’ and ‘WANNABE’, and sets out to follow the formula once more with a bright sound of hip-hop, Latin and moombahton together”.

AllMusic’s Neil Z. Yeung summed the record up in four lines. He wrote that it is “packed with club-friendly anthems that incorporate hip-hop attitude, R&B harmonics, and electronic edge (like hit single ‘Loco’)”, and that “the set also includes the sweeping ballad ‘Mirror’ and a handful of instrumental bonus tracks”.

Among the tracks

IZM names three of the B-sides. Kim wrote that “‘Sooo lucky’, teen pop on a good-feeling melody that brings Taylor Swift to mind, lets out the positive energy that stands for ITZY and uses a swelling rhythm to reach a dramatic effect as well”.

He went on: “there is an ease about the songs that carry a fresh air — ‘Love is’, which lights an affecting vocal over dreamy keys, and ‘Chillin’ chillin’‘, whose bouncing sense of time recalls Imagine Dragons’ ‘Thunder’.” All three are songs he marked as recommendations in the piece.

The track AllMusic names on its own is the ninth, ‘Mirror’. By the album introduction, writers from inside and outside Korea worked on all nine of the new songs.

Numbers

The CHECKMATE album introduction gives this record’s placings as figures. The album entered the Billboard 200 dated 9 October 2021 at number 11, 137 places above where GUESS WHO had started, and it was the group’s best placing on that chart at the time. By the same text it also reached number 12 on the Artist 100.

AllMusic records that on release CRAZY IN LOVE topped the United States World Albums and Independent Albums charts and rose to number two in Korea.