It seems like the weekend will be dedicated to catching up as I still have a few more reviews to get through. Hence, there will no Japanese review this week. But there are other songs to check out in the meantime. IZ is one of the groups to return during the week, with the release of Final Kiss on Wednesday. The band’s last comeback was with EDEN, which was released back in May of this year.

Final Kiss takes a unique approach with its Summery track, placing emphasis on its rock instrumentation and reducing the vocals a fair bit to allow for the instrumentation to be focused upon. There isn’t anything wrong about this. To be exact, I don’t think there has been much of s song lately that does this. So there is a slight freshness to it, which I think works really well with the idea of a Summer song. The instrumentation feels loaded, giving the song some definition and oomph, which I really enjoyed. There was almost a head-banging feel to it, which is something I enjoy hearing when it comes to rock music (‘Almost’ being a keyword here. It just doesn’t feel exactly like it got into that territory).  It just feels awkwardly unbalanced. Every section had a part dedicated to instrumental, so it left the members with very little opportunity to flourish vocally. What we managed to hear was pretty good itself. But I just felt like they could have reduced some of the instrumentation and given more of themselves to the track. 

The video shows a comparison between their life indoors versus the outdoors by the pool. Rewatching the video a few times, I found it very boring and dry, not something you expect from the Summer concept. The idea is rather typical and I think the producers of the video could have done something to get the video to stand out. They may have been limited to the Summer concept but that feels like a minor hurdle nowadays given the magnitude of the industry. Unfortunately, what we got isn’t something that I find worthwhile watching again and again.

Song – 7.5/10
Music Video – 5/10
Overall Rating – 6.5/10