GUESS WHO

The record

GUESS WHO is ITZY’s fourth mini album, released on 30 April 2021 with six tracks. The title track is ‘마.피.아. In the morning’ (Ma.pi.a. In the morning) — the Korean half is the word “mafia” set out one syllable at a time, which is how the label prints it. It came eight months after Not Shy, and the album introduction says it was released worldwide on the same day.

The introduction on Bugs says the title track took the party game of mafia as its starting point, and carries a message about approaching someone with your own feelings hidden and taking theirs. By the same text J.Y. Park handled the lyrics, composition and arrangement as well as instrument sessions and vocal direction, and the overseas writer LYRE worked with the group for the first time. The introduction says the five members presented two concepts at once, ‘DAY’ and ‘NIGHT’, and that the music video stages the game’s guessing and asks, as the album’s name does, which of them is the mafia.

Reviews

NME’s Sofiana Ramli reviewed the record four days after release. The deck read: “Despite some minor let-downs, the JYP Entertainment girl group deliver the bops on their most cohesive project yet”.

In her closing paragraph she wrote that “‘Guess Who’ is by far ITZY’s most cohesive project in terms of sound”, and added that “each song transitions smoothly into the other, making its 18-minute runtime seem way too short and ripe for a relisten”. After three years of trial and error since their 2019 debut, she wrote, “the girl group seem to have successfully found a brand of maximalist pop that works for them”.

AllMusic’s Neil Z. Yeung read the record as a combination of hip-hop-influenced dance pop with an empowering, anthemic sound, and wrote that the combination had won a wide international audience — far enough that the title track was also issued in an English-language version.

Among the tracks

The song NME put first among the others is the third track, ‘KIDDING ME’. Ramli called it “the album’s centrepiece” and “a saucy eye-roll at a hesitant partner”, and wrote that “featuring trap drums and a compelling dance break, it has every bit of potential to have been the mini-album’s title track”. The album introduction credits its lyrics, composition and arrangement all to Kobee, who made ‘Not Shy’.

The same review works through the rest. The second track ‘Sorry Not Sorry’ is “a bouncy rock-inflected production that actually deserves the spot as the album’s intro”, while ‘Wild Wild West’ “feels like a fun epilogue to their rodeo-themed ‘Not Shy’”. Of ‘SHOOT!’ she wrote that it is “a trippy kaleidoscope of sonic textures”.

Of the closing ‘TENNIS (0:0)’ Ramli wrote that it “strikes a perfect balance between playful and endearing, without being extremely cloying”. Reading the sport as a metaphor for a fluttering romance, she said, the song shows that even the most self-assured person can turn bashful in front of someone they like. By the album introduction ‘Wild Wild West’ is built on a guitar loop that calls up the music of the American West, and the rapper Mad Clown worked on the lyrics of ‘SHOOT!’.

Numbers

AllMusic records that the record’s crossover success “pushed this six-song effort onto the Billboard 200, their first appearance on the main U.S. chart”.

The following year’s CHECKMATE album introduction gives the numbers. The record entered the Billboard 200 at 148 and reached 99 on the Artist 100, putting ITZY on both of Billboard’s main charts at once.