ZERO : FEVER Part.2

The record

ZERO : FEVER Part.2 is ATEEZ’s sixth mini album, released on 1 March 2021 with seven tracks. The title track is ‘Fireworks (I’m The One)’, and the record is the second in the FEVER series, after ZERO : FEVER Part.1.

The album introduction carried by Bugs sets the record’s subject in a single word — style, in the sense of carrying yourself well rather than of clothes. “Everyone has an image they admire, and they call it style,” it says, and then asks: “but is a self fitted to other people’s eyes really me?” The same text presents the title track as “a song where an EDM rhythm stands out inside a restrained trap beat”, carrying “the message of getting out from under the world’s wrong ideas and burning your own spark into a real flame”. Of the fourth track, ‘Take Me Home’, the introduction says in advance that it is set against a key event in the world the next record would open.

Reviews

The music webzine IZM reviewed the record in March 2021. The writer is Im Seon-hui.

Im summed the group’s concept up in one phrase — “power with lyricism added” — and wrote of what that concept had built to then: “it maximised compression and release through the control of loud and soft, and it was striking that the variations put into a song, like riding a rollercoaster, left no room to be bored.”

What the review treats at greatest length here is the B-sides. “It is surprising, rather, that the album tracks attempt unfamiliar experiments and are quite well finished,” Im wrote, and then took two of them in turn.

Among the tracks

The first Im named is ‘Take Me Home’. The review calls it a track that “finishes off well an eighties retro sound carrying a trace of The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding lights’ and ‘In your eyes’”, and adds: “choosing vaporwave instead of the disco that shook last year, it gained a polish, and in the second half the saxophone solo by Jason Lee of Eightball Town is the finishing touch.”

The song that follows is ‘Celebrate’. Im wrote that it “melts gospel, rarely seen in the idol market, into the chorus and casts a richer nineties R&B”. By the album introduction the leader Hongjoong took part in the writing, composition and arrangement of this one, and it starts from a single line — “congratulations on being born as you”.

The second track, ‘The Leaders’, is introduced by the label as a hard hip-hop song carrying the idea that “style is when I am myself”. The last two places on the record go to an English version of ‘Take Me Home’ and a different arrangement of the title track.

Numbers

The sales figures for this record were given six months later, in the album introduction to ZERO : FEVER Part.3. By that text the record passed 300,000 copies in its first week, earning a platinum certification, and later passed 500,000 cumulative copies.

The awards that came before it are in the record’s own introduction. The group took three prizes across the 2020 MAMA and the 2020 The Fact Music Awards, the text says, and in 2021, the year of this release, it won at the 10th Gaon Chart Music Awards and the 30th Seoul Music Awards.

What came next

The FEVER series continues with ZERO : FEVER Part.3 and closes that December with the repackage ZERO : FEVER EPILOGUE.