IZ*ONE – Fiesta

*Ludacris voice* Balloons!

[Video]
[6.43]Juana Giaimo: Just like the title implies, this sounds like a great party in the form of a pop song. The changes in the speed of the beat (classic synth pop, house and trap all in one song!) let the melody shine through. The drop is a little bit off-putting, but their voices are so good that I can forget about it for a few seconds.
[7]

Brad Shoup: Future house buckled into a roller coaster. It took me a bit to get used to the BPM, but there’s all kinds of pleasant details woven into here, from the twinkling sequencing, to the prechorus that angles into R&B, to the honking hook.
[8]

Ian Mathers: There’s some nice layering here — every time a bright little piano flourish briefly surfaces I smile a little — but otherwise this is so straightforward and almost predictable (within genre bounds of course) that it needs those little touches to keep from being pleasant but entirely forgettable.
[6]

Michael Hong: There’s little to latch onto here, as it all just feels like a standard K-pop affair. That’s not say that there’s anything wrong; it sparkles, it shines, and it feels incredibly buoyant. But in a crowded field of girl group tracks over the past month, “Fiesta” does little to stand out with only IZ*ONE’s vocals that feel chirpier than the next group. All that seems to wash away when the noisy post-chorus drop comes, over-shining them and hitting a hard reset when they finally return to the track.
[4]

Alex Clifton: It’s rather like eating four chocolate truffles at once: overwhelmingly sweet with an explosion of different flavors that, in the end, work quite well together. It’s fizzy disco with an electro edge, complete with whimsy twinkly flourishes and a bridge that could be the closing song to an anime. It’s all very well blended, though, and remains winning despite the jarring pronunciation of “fee-ess-TA” at the beginning of the chorus — a minor note, but as it’s sung with the emphasis on a different syllable later on, it stands out. Still, it’s got the kind of magic I sought at high school dances, an effervescence that would make me lose myself in the song with ease before surfacing to breathe after four minutes. Not an easy sensation to replicate, but it’s one I appreciate.
[7]

Kayla Beardslee: Imagine if you combined the cloying sweetness of “Fancy” with the overwhelming sound effects of “Icy” to create a new song, one that balances its flood of cuteness and optimism with surprising synth flourishes and whose airy but confident vocal performances bridge the gap between the two. The result would be pretty impressive and joyous, right?
[8]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Maybe it’s just my broken brain, but I’ve become so disenchanted with a lot of K-pop lately (though that’s probably what anyone who’s been reading my blurbs on TSJ have thought since I joined the site). “Fiesta” is flashy and well-produced, but it has the glossiness of other formulaic dance pop songs we’ve heard from, say, GWSN. There’s no surprise, no soul, no hook that leaves me humming. Alas, it’s objectively good. And that’s the dilemma: K-pop singles are all unassailable nowadays for various reasons, but few ever get to dizzying levels of greatness.
[5]