Home—a structure built to shelter people or animals from the cold, heat, wind, and rain, and to live within. BOYNEXTDOOR’s first studio album, “HOME,” starts from the most familiar place there is. But the home in “ddok ddok ddok,” released in the lead-up to the album drop, is no safe haven. Whatever faith we place in the idea that home protects us from disaster and danger, every part of the home in this particular music video is horribly shattered, punctured, destroyed, blown apart, broken into. A crowd gathers outside the door, ringing the bell over and over again, just like the doorbell sound that loops throughout the song. Stay inside, and someone will keep pounding on the door. Step outside, and you’ll get batted around like the mouse in the music video, helpless when a cat’s several times your size. Their home is no longer safe.

Bunker—a dugout built to shield soldiers from enemy fire and monitoring. When they can’t even feel safe within the walls of their own home, BOYNEXTDOOR retreats into a bunker. In the concept film of the same name, the group finds themselves in a place cut off from the outside world. All they have is each other. Even a symbol of the little things that make life brighter like broccoli is reduced to something like the faint outline of an X-ray. Even the little joys in life aren’t allowed here, and yet, within that confined space, the boys come face to face with an unexpected realization: “Within this confined space, we have built something that finally feels like home.” Across a set of four concept films, they set out in search of home (“NAVIGATOR”), try to build their own (“WEAVER”), and retreat into a space sealed off from the world (“BUNKER”), but in the end, they decide home is wherever they’re with each other (“SWEET HOME”). “HOME” is no longer a place but a connection.

Home—a house where a family lives together. Or, figuratively, a group of people who consider themselves a unit. As the “NAVIGATOR” concept film puts it, a look at BOYNEXTDOOR’s home reveals “a room still holding our family’s warmth. A room where we stayed up all night burning with passion and energy. A room carrying the lingering thoughts and emotion left after our practice.” The “HOME” they’ve built with their album is a space that welcomes everyone they hold most dear. “Forever You” is a song about family, ”06070” documents their trainee years, and “I Wonder” is a message to their fans, and yet, paradoxically, this home hasn’t felt entirely safe—because they know that family, dreams, and the bonds they share with fans might not last forever. Dreams push you forward, but they also mean that “glamour is a loan I borrowed for a moment / Sense of inferiority, that’s the interest I pay / Even a small bite is enough” (“06070”). With family, gratitude (“Life taught me that it’s difficult to find anybody on your side … Even on days I loathe myself / Please, can you love me?”) and uncertainty (“Even if nothing lasts forever”) exist side by side (“Forever You”). And their relationship with fans reflects something similar: “Why was I at my clumsiest / Why were you so perfect when we met,” they ask, noting how, “As I get happier / I’m just as anxious today” (“I Wonder”). For BOYNEXTDOOR, home isn’t a perfect shelter—it’s the name of every person they’ll hold onto, no matter how imperfect things get.

“HOME” seems like it’s about finding somewhere to belong, but really, it’s about finding the people you belong with. “I walked around for a while,” a voiceover says in the film essay “Finding HOME.” “Not knowing where I was. Where is our home? I wondered.” In the video, the boys are scattered apart from each other in places like a convenience store, a hospital, an apartment building, a park, in the street. But then LEEHAN, who had stopped engaging with the world around him, and SUNGHO, who had been holed away in a house, find each other. TAESAN, too, pulls RIWOO—whose whole routine had been reduced to staring out a hospital window—onto his motorcycle and back out into the wider world. And for JAEHYUN, who had only ever taken pictures of other people, WOONHAK gives him something he’d never had before—a photo of JAEHYUN himself. They don’t really know each other, and yet they all connect with an almost uncanny ease, “like people I’ve met somewhere” before. After being alone by circumstance or by choice, the boys meet each other one by one, and only then do they start to smile, to talk, to let someone else into their world. It’s how people start out different from one another but come to be a home.

That’s what all that time spent just trying to survive alone eventually added up to. “Finding HOME” is a cinematic imagining of strangers progressively becoming a part of each other’s worlds until they become connected, and the song “06070” is a retelling of how BOYNEXTDOOR’s real-life connection was born out of fundamentally different people meeting as trainees until, over time, they became one unified group. Those days “at twenty, Hyehwa station, in a shabby restaurant … What I broke that day / Was it the dish I was serving, or my dream” that might have, for all they knew, never have come true, eventually gave way to the boys standing “on the stage / In front of thousands of people / Living the dream with my eyes open”—because they “made it through those days alone so now” they “can be six.”

“No one knows us better than we know each other,” JAEHYUN says in the first episode of “HOME VIDEO,” “I Wonder.” BOYNEXTDOOR’s “HOME” isn’t somewhere that offers absolute protection, but a place created by people who want to look out for each other. Family, dreams, fans, the group—a house may crumble, and a door can be broken down. Even a bunker can’t act as a shelter forever. But anywhere is home, as long as they have each other. “HOME” isn’t about finding a safe place to hide from the world. Rather, BOYNEXTDOOR’s album tells the story of imperfect people coming together, holding onto that which matters most, and learning to call each other home.