CLOSE YOUR EYES on Making Fans Proud, Breaking Genre Boundaries & the Dreams Driving Their Next Chapter
Categoria: Musica
The latest cover stars of Billboard Korea Artist discuss their genre-blending sound, personal growth and the ambitions shaping their future.
Por Billboard | 06/08/2026
The ideal metaphor to describe the journey of CLOSE YOUR EYES — borrowing the concept of the group’s first record — is a book with many chapters. Each one sheds light on a different nuance of the seven members who won the survival show Project 7 . Related CLOSE YOUR EYES Is Billboard’s K-Pop Rookie of the Month for December: Exclusive Photos Charlie Puth Partners Up With Lucky Brand How Role Model Convinced His Label Not to Pair Him With Big-Name Producers After 'Sally' Success: 'I Got to Trust My Gut This Time' Since the group’s debut in April 2025 with ETERNALT , the band has moved across genres and styles without ever losing the distinctive quality that makes them move as one body in every single track, and that speaks to their uniqueness within the K-pop landscape — a uniqueness also rewarded by the numbers: Third mini album blackout sold more than 570,000 copies in its first week, setting, at the time, the best first-week result among male groups that debuted in 2025. That record marked a stylistic turning point for CLOSE YOUR EYES: If the first project was distinctive for its narrative style and sounds — with a lot of acoustic guitar, starting from the opening track that bears the band’s name — the second, Snowy Summer , emphasized certain aspects tied to the adolescent world with a magnetic title track, while blackout dragged the group into much faster, more electronic rhythms. “We wanted to show a new side of us. I was looking for music in a variety of genres, and then I got to work with Imanbek. He was very interested in K-pop, so I thought, ‘If we work with him, we might be able to do something new in the existing scene, not only as CLOSE YOUR EYES, but also with a style that is quite foreign to K-pop,’” recalls the group leader JEON MINWOOK. The third mini album is also fundamental to the band’s story because it represented one of the first instances in which the members participated even more actively in the writing and creation process. KIM SUNGMIN, during our call, underlines the importance of the influence of their creative director, LEE HAEIN, who has been with them from the very beginning: “Every time we release an album, she involves us in many activities, such as writing the lyrics, coming up with the choreography and even taking care of the styling. With every comeback we learn something more about how to define an artistic direction.” And it is precisely for this reason that, looking back, SEO KYOUNGBAE realizes that a year and a few months since their debut, they have grown above all in terms of expression: “I think we know how to express ourselves more clearly. Also, we did a lot of cover performances at awards ceremonies, and that helped us to understand new genres and concepts better. We have a clearer idea of who we are now.” Another fundamental figure in the band’s artistic development, particularly in the early months, was ADORA. The singer-songwriter and for