BOYNEXTDOOR’s first love trilogy has reached its conclusion. Over the span of three albums, the group told the story of meeting someone new to having to say goodbye in their own words, their clear voices ringing out as they captured the sometimes awkward but always memorable experience of a first crush. We sat down to get the inside scoop on the album triptych—a musical trilogy that helped the six boys open the door to the wider world and a wider range of emotions—from marketing team member Lee Suhyeon, Choi A Ra from Production Team 1, design department member Han Hyunji, and A&R department member Lee Seoyoon.

How did you want BOYNEXTDOOR’s first love to come across?
Lee Seoyoon: We wanted it to feel fresh, and hopefully resonate with the young generation. So, we encouraged the group members to share their ideas for key words and phrases and to work their own emotional experiences into the lyrics. This came up in their interviews already, but we even ended up including the story about JAEHYUN’s father being smitten with JAEHYUN’s mother and asking her out right outside her door. (laughs) Each of the group members drew on personal experiences like this to write lyrics from the perspective of someone who’s fallen in love for the first time. Then they made one complete story about first love by taking those songs they made, singing them, and bringing them to life on the stage.

Choi A Ra: There’s a particular image behind both the concepts of first love and the boy next door. They universally call up images of childhood friends, classmates, and kids you randomly see on the bus. We wanted to depict these as everyday things and yet things that don’t really exist in the real world. If you look at the photos from their debut album, it’s all familiar spaces, like by your neighbor’s door, or a paved road. For WHY.., the second album, there’s places teens might go on dates for real or where they might get dumped. (laughs) With the six boys just starting out, we tried to show their love as pure and sincere through that.

The “BOYNEXTDOOR said…” parts in the album descriptions feel like they were lifted directly from the diary of someone deep in love for the first time. What led you to present the track listing this way?
Lee Seoyoon: Right from the planning stage of BOYNEXTDOOR, we felt it was important to really foreground the story of the group. We aimed to connect the physical albums, music videos, and lyrics like a TV series so fans could connect more deeply with the boys and their love stories. The “BOYNEXTDOOR said…” thing was one part of that effort. It’s like how you can see a summary of each episode under the thumbnails on Netflix. We were motivated by that to write out the tracklist in a fun way. The idea was for the stories the group told to come across to listeners in a clear and fun way even before listening to the album, with the group members being the narrators, characters, and protagonists of all the songs. We hoped the music, along with the unique album descriptions, would allow the stories the boys were telling to create a kind of understanding with listeners.

Was there anything you focused on in particular to emphasize the way the feelings of love changed between albums?
Choi A Ra: The first love trilogy follows a non-linear timeline, so when HOW? was coming out, we put a lot of thought into how we could get fans curious about what happens in the time between first dating someone and breaking up with them. We thought maybe a fun video explaining the story for the trilogy could work, but since BOYNEXTDOOR is about telling stories everyone can relate to, we didn’t want to make it too complicated, so we chose to do a puppet show to keep it light and easy to digest for everyone. “Between WHO and WHY” has a character named WOONHAK who represents the fans, and we never find out whether WOONHAK’s feelings are reciprocated after telling his crush how he feels. We wanted fans to empathize with him and be curious together.

Han Hyunji: We decided to reveal each album’s storyline using key colors. Since BOYNEXTDOOR was starting from zero, we focused on youthfulness for the debut album and then expressed the emotional change from love to breakup for the follow-up album. We shifted from blue to deep magenta and added in a heart bursting open with cotton. When we were working on the third album, HOW?, we had many discussions among ourselves to make sure the non-linear timeline wouldn’t be confusing. Our producer, ZICO, felt using the key colors from both WHO! and WHY.. could connect the stories together smoothly, and we worked to incorporate that. We’re pretty focused on getting the mood of the songs across in as intuitive a manner as possible when we work on the album covers.

How have the six boys changed from the first love trilogy?
Lee Suhyeon: The first love trilogy ended with having shown all the different emotions you go through between getting together and saying goodbye. By going on that journey, BOYNEXTDOOR got to experience some new feelings firsthand for the first time in their lives—everything from happiness to the feeling of powerlessness when things are beyond your control. I think those experiences have helped to shape their perspective on the world. No doubt they gained some insight into different kinds of relationships and emotions through everything they’ve been doing. But the six of them still have a lot of time left to be young. They have many more stories to tell beyond just love stories, and they’re going to experience new emotions and face other new experiences, too. So it’s not so much that they’ve changed a lot with these albums—more that, now that they’ve been in love and dealt with a lot of different emotions, they’ve opened up a new avenue to say new things about the world, I think. (laughs) Most likely BOYNEXTDOOR will spend their next album singing about what it means to be young in an easygoing, honest way, too.