Zayn, Jisoo take cosmic leap in 'Eyes Closed'

East meets West as the British-Pakistani star and K-pop idol launch a futuristic love story

When Zayn Malik and BLACKPINK's Jisoo announced their collaboration earlier this week, the internet predictably combusted.

The two pop powerhouses - one a former One Direction heartthrob from Bradford with Pakistani roots, the other a K-pop global icon - joined forces for a duet titled 'Eyes Closed', released worldwide on Friday.

Within hours, the song's video had crossed five million views on YouTube, proving that fandoms from Seoul to Karachi were more than ready for this intergalactic pairing.

The track, a lush ballad drenched in electronic melancholy, finds Jisoo and Zayn trading verses about love's contradictions - the push and pull between memory and renewal, past and possibility.

Their refrain, 'The past can't hurt us if we don't look', sets the emotional tone: it's a song about closing your eyes to history and opening your heart to something uncertain, even improbable.

Zayn, whose solo career has been defined by introspective R&B and romantic experimentation, sounds in familiar territory - breathy, brooding, and heartbreakingly restrained.

Jisoo, meanwhile, brings her signature crystalline tone and emotional precision, softening the track's edge while giving it a glimmer of hope. Together, their voices intertwine with surprising ease, suggesting not just chemistry but contrast - a duet between shadow and light.

The song's release coincided with several other major drops this week - HAIM teamed up with Bon Iver for 'Tie You Down', Gorillaz unveiled 'The Manifesto' featuring Trueno and Proof, and Khalid returned with a full-length album, 'After the Sun Goes Down'.

But it's 'Eyes Closed' that has captured the cultural imagination, largely because of the unlikely pairing at its core. Zayn brings moody, R&B-influenced introspection; Jisoo, K-pop precision and visual drama. Together, they've crafted something that sits comfortably between both worlds - and slightly outside them too.

The 'Eyes Closed' music video, directed with cinematic flair, is nothing short of a sci-fi fever dream. It opens with a retro spaceship drifting through the stars, its chrome surfaces glinting like a disco ball lost in deep space.

Jisoo awakens from cryosleep, her voice trembling as she sings about time standing still. Zayn, encased in a matching pod, responds: 'I know what you're feeling, and I know you wanna say it'.

What follows is a visual symphony of surreal imagery - part 'Passengers', part 'Interstellar', with a sprinkle of Kubrick's eerie minimalism. The two artists move through sterile hallways, floating in anti-gravity sequences that blur the line between dance and dream.

At one point, Zayn literally tilts in slow motion, his body hovering midair as if surrendering to the physics of love. Their interstellar IDs flash across the screen - Zayn's destination: LV-500 - hinting at a mysterious voyage to an unknown planet.

The symbolism is heavy-handed but deliberate: love, in their world, is both an escape and an experiment. When the duo finally meet in a blinding white corridor lined with a crimson carpet, it feels less like reunion and more like reckoning.

'Ain't nobody perfect, but it's all good,' they sing, surrounded by floating metallic orbs that shift and shimmer like liquid mercury. The lyrics, while simple, take on an existential hue in the context of their surreal surroundings.

Love, it seems, is not about perfection - it's about surrender amid chaos. If the video's cosmic setting seems over the top, that's precisely the point. Between visual metaphors and playful absurdity, 'Eyes Closed' embraces its own strangeness.

At one moment, Jisoo cradles a smartphone - her nails exaggeratedly spiked in gleaming silver - a cheeky nod to the hyper-stylised aesthetic of modern pop. Moments later, the spaceship drifts past Saturn, its rings glowing in soft pink light.

Despite its visual splendour, critics have been divided over the pair's on-screen dynamic. Their shared moments total barely half a minute, leading some to question whether the song's intimacy translates into actual chemistry.

Compared to the kinetic energy of Bruno Mars and BLACKPINK's Lisa in 'APT', 'Eyes Closed' feels more restrained - almost too cool to combust. Yet that restraint may be precisely what defines its allure.

Rather than the instant heat of conventional pop duets, Zayn and Jisoo offer something more elusive: emotional distance rendered beautiful. Their interaction is fleeting, their connection uncertain - and that fragility mirrors the song's theme of blind faith in love's possibility.

"Someone like me and someone like you shouldn't work," they sing. It's a confession, a question, and perhaps a prophecy. For all its cosmic visuals, 'Eyes Closed' is, at its heart, a deeply human song about the courage to try again after heartbreak.

The collaboration also marks a significant moment in the globalisation of pop. Zayn, a British-Pakistani artist who has long fused R&B with South Asian undercurrents, joins Jisoo, one of the most recognisable faces of K-pop's international wave. Their union - East meeting West, masculine melancholy meeting feminine poise - feels both inevitable and revolutionary.

For Zayn, 'Eyes Closed' continues a return to creative visibility after years of relative silence. For Jisoo, it's another step in her solo evolution beyond BLACKPINK's group identity, showcasing her as a performer capable of subtlety as much as spectacle.