IT'z ICY

The record

IT’z ICY is ITZY’s first mini album, released on 29 July 2019 with five tracks. The title track is ‘ICY’. It came five months after the debut single IT’z Different in February of the same year.

The album introduction on Bugs presents ‘ICY’ as a summer song about looking cool on the outside while running hot underneath, and says it is the first song J.Y. Park wrote and composed for the group. The same text says that where the debut song ‘달라달라’ (Dalla Dalla) — the title is the Korean for “it’s different” said twice — asked listeners to respect and love the self at the centre of their world, this one goes a step further into certainty and self-belief, and it quotes two lines as examples. By that introduction the rapper PENOMECO joined J.Y. Park on the lyrics, and Cazzi Opeia and Ellen Berg were among the composers.

Reviews

IZM’s writing on this record arrived three years after it did. In October 2022 the outlet ran a feature titled 「2010년 이후, 당신이 기억해야 할 K팝 댄스 트랙」 — K-pop dance tracks to remember from 2010 on — and put the third track, ‘IT’z SUMMER’, on the list. The selection note was written by Jang Jun-hwan.

He opened with the line that “the future of K-pop as JYP imagined it converges on ITZY”. Taking in ‘24Hrs’ and ‘Not shy’ after it, he wrote that “the combination of the label’s popular know-how and an experimental stand has settled today into a trademark that belongs to ITZY alone”, and added: “and the beginning of that style was ‘It’z summer’.”

Among the tracks

‘IT’z SUMMER’ is the song that note is about. Jang called it “a magic three minutes that sprints past on the shout ‘I like this thrill, I want to dance’”, and wrote that “there is a polish in a texture colder than cold, frozen over, and in its measured sense of speed even a trace of the rapture of trance”. His closing sentence was that, unlike the ordinary idea of a dance track that heats the body up, this is “a hidden chill track that will calmly cool your head down”.

By the track list on Bugs the last two places on the record go to remixes: DallasK and Imad Royal reworking ‘달라달라’ and ‘WANT IT?’, the two songs from the debut single. The first mini album is built as three new songs plus two remakes of what came before it.

Numbers

Billboard’s Jeff Benjamin reported in a chart story dated 18 March 2020 that this album was ITZY’s first entry on the World Albums chart, starting at number 11 in the summer of 2019. The same story put its United States sales at around 1,000 copies.