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.
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.
