IT'z Different

The record

IT’z Different is ITZY’s debut single album, released on 12 February 2019. It carries two songs, the title track ‘Dalla Dalla’ and ‘WANT IT?’. In the album introduction JYP Entertainment describes ‘Dalla Dalla’ as a fusion groove track carrying the group’s identity. The music video went up on the label’s official channel on 10 February, two days before release.

Reviews

Idology (아이돌로지), a Korean webzine on idol pop whose writers sign their own notes, gave the record two pages: two notes in its Draft column on 5 March 2019, and three more on 11 April in the column it gives to the releases of the middle of each month.

In the Draft column Third took up who is speaking in the lyrics. Even with no plan for how to live, the speaker shouts that she will live her own way — “‘Dalla Dalla’ is a song that carries that voice of a teenager,” he wrote. Reading the lyrics as a deck of cards, scattered and reshuffled declarations rather than a narrative, he wrote that “the key that presses those fragments of a message into one lump is precisely the energy the members of ITZY have”.

Squib, on the same page, took up the sheer push of it. “Rather than specifying what is different, the momentum with which they shove out an ‘I’m just different’ regardless is itself out of the ordinary,” Squib wrote, adding that the sporty performance surging through it lends that momentum extra spring. This much self-assurance and guilelessness, the note says, had been hard to find for some time.

In the mid-month column Myoo listened to the design of the arrangement. The recipe of “combining a house beat with the reach of bass music, so that a taut charisma and an exhilaratingly fast hook come together, is a move at once simple, bold and shrewd”, Myoo wrote, adding: “Above all, the members’ vivid and forceful appeal is an intuitive fascination that goes past everything else.” Cho Eun-jae wrote that “the debut song ‘Dalla Dalla’ likewise introduces ITZY to the public effectively, with nothing in it to let pass”, and found the most striking thing about the group to be a performance built to a standard rarely seen of late. Quivi called the record “a debut single that will stand as one of the notable markers of the 2019 K-pop scene”.

The Singles Jukebox, where a panel of British and American music writers each file a note of their own on one single, covered the title track on 21 February 2019. Thomas Inskeep called it “a refreshing change of pace in girl group K-Pop”, with the five women “proudly proclaiming their difference/s and independence”, and heard hard electropop “with rap breaks folded into the batter, and Itzy sells it; their delivery matches their lyrics”. Joshua Minsoo Kim wrote that not since Weki Meki’s ‘I Don’t Like Your Girlfriend’ “has a K-pop single featured audacious genre-blending that played a crucial role in driving home its lyrics”, and read the song as encouraging others to love themselves by flaunting the group’s own uniqueness. David Moore heard the same disorder as a virtue: “the clatter and clutter in the sonics is its own sort of liberating.”

Among the tracks

The second track, ‘WANT IT?’, is the one Squib singled out in the Draft column. It “pours out shouting over a punk-flavoured guitar backing, to the point of being almost too much, and shows a formidable energy”, Squib wrote.

Numbers

Circle Chart placed ‘Dalla Dalla’ at number five on its Digital Chart for week seven of 2019 (10 to 16 February), the week of release. It was at number three the following week, week eight (17 to 23 February).