Not Shy

The record

Not Shy is ITZY’s third mini album, released on 17 August 2020 with six tracks. The title track carries the album’s name. It followed IT’z ME by five months.

The album introduction on Bugs says this is the first time since the group’s debut that the title track took love as its subject. The same text describes ‘Not Shy’ as an up-tempo R&B dance song built on a hard saxophone line and a fast beat, credits the lyrics to J.Y. Park and the composition to Kobee, and quotes Park saying that “with this song we concentrated on letting ITZY’s energy out as far as it would go, and the choreography came together powerful and stylish with it”.

Reviews

IZM’s Im Seon-hui reviewed the single in August 2020. She opened by writing that the song “is armoured in sound filled in without a gap, as though it carried the nerve of a young composer just starting out”.

Of the arrangement she wrote that “the funky rhythm of the saxophone governs the whole song, and a structure that keeps switching moves the centre of gravity around, adding a sense of depth to the music”. On the melody: “the melody carries strongly throughout”, and “the passage from the pre-chorus into the chorus is smooth enough to do the work of raising expectation”, with “the members’ singing, more natural than before, playing its part”. Of where the record stands next to the last one she wrote that “looking somewhere other than the previous release and trying something new is encouraging”.

Among the tracks

The album introduction sets out who wrote the other five. The second track ‘Don’t Give A What’ was made by the lyricist Lee Seu-ran with collapsedone, and the third, ‘Louder’, has words by the lyricist Dr.JO.

By the same text the fifth track ‘SURF’ has lyrics by the team danke and an arrangement by the British production team LDN Noise, and the closing ‘Be In Love’ was both written and composed by KENZIE. The introduction makes a point of the fact that all six tracks carry credits from writers working inside and outside Korea.

Around it

The album introduction also records where the group stood when the record arrived. The music video for the debut song ‘달라달라’ (Dalla Dalla) passed 200 million views on YouTube in June 2020, one year and four months after the debut, and the three music videos released to that point came to about 550 million views between them.

The same text says the video was shot over five days, and that Yeji and Ryujin took driving tests beforehand for a car chase filmed on open ground. By the introduction the members said this was the hardest choreography of any of their promoted songs so far.