ZERO : FEVER Part.3

The record

ZERO : FEVER Part.3 is ATEEZ’s seventh mini album, released on 13 September 2021 with six tracks. ‘Eternal Sunshine’ and ‘Deja Vu’ were both title tracks, and the record is the third in the FEVER series.

The album introduction carried by Bugs sets the record’s colour against the one before it. Where ZERO : FEVER Part.2 lit “a hot red flame”, this one talks about “a youth in blue”. The same text says both title tracks were chosen by a fan vote — the ‘ATEEZ NEXT SONG’ project the group had run each year — and that this time the recordings and the performance videos of both songs were released before the album so that the vote on which to promote could be taken.

Reviews

The idol-pop webzine Idology (아이돌로지) covered both title tracks in 「Monthly : 2021년 9월 – 싱글」 — singles, September 2021 — dated 17 October 2021. The writer is Simdyang.

The note opens on a question — “has a cool-down been put into the fever that rose with ‘FEVER’?” — and says a chilled feeling has continued since the Japanese single released that July. Of the impression the two songs make together, Simdyang wrote that they “offer a mood that is fresh and chilled at once, like the green and blue of the album art”.

Billboard put ‘Deja Vu’ on its list of the 25 best K-pop songs of 2021, dated 18 December 2021. The entry begins “ATEEZ has quickly risen with their undeniable brand of powerful, heavy hip-hop, and ‘Deja Vu’ sees the group at their best”, and closes: “Coupled with the knocking beat and a slightly sinister vibe, the single pairs perfectly with ATEEZ’s concept as K-pop’s time-traveling pirates and further shows why these underdogs cannot be overlooked.”

Among the tracks

The song both writers took up is ‘Deja Vu’. Simdyang found its appeal in a mismatch of speed and colour — “the gap that opens when a rather slow BPM and a low saturation meet a tension about to burst is quite stimulating” — and named the chorus and the first verse’s post-chorus as the places where that gap shows. Billboard read the same song against the group’s concept.

On ‘Eternal Sunshine’, Simdyang picked out the place where “Can’t stop the feeling” lifts the tension another step, and wrote that it “brings to mind a carbonation that fizzes unusually hard”. With the sixth track, ‘Not Too Late’, this is the shortest record in the series at six songs.

Numbers

This record’s figures were given three months later, in the album introduction to the repackage ZERO : FEVER EPILOGUE. By that text it set a group best of 660,000 copies in its first week, and reached number one on the iTunes Top Albums chart in 43 countries and on the Worldwide iTunes Album Chart. The same text says the record entered the Billboard 200 for the first time at number 42 and charted in seven categories in all.

Billboard reported in a chart story dated 13 January 2023 that the record had reached number six on the Top Album Sales chart in 2021.

What came next

The FEVER series closes that December with ZERO : FEVER EPILOGUE, and the following summer THE WORLD EP.1 : MOVEMENT opens a new series.