Don't Close Your Eyes is Kael Hope at his most cinematic - a seven-track score for a horror film that doesn't exist, built around a single phrase that the music keeps trying to convince itself of: it's over, right?
The album
The score follows a tight emotional arc from end to end. Don't Close Your Eyes opens with the warning. Behind You and The Scream deliver the threat. Is It Over?, NOPE., You Thought It Was Over? and It's Over... Right? play the entire post-climax tradition of horror scoring as a series of false endings - each one resolves, then doesn't, then resolves, then doesn't. It's a score that understands the genre it's pretending to score, and it leans into the joke without ever breaking the tension.
The instrumentation is sparse and percussive where it needs to be, and openly orchestral where the moment calls for it. There's a vocal piece in the middle of the album - NOPE. - that breaks the instrumental rule with a spoken-rapped verse, a deliberate disruption that lands like the moment in a horror film when a character finally says out loud what they've been afraid to admit.
The story
This is the album that proves Kael Hope can write to picture even when there is no picture. The score is structured exactly the way a real soundtrack would be: cues that match scenes, themes that recur, an arc that builds and pretends to release. By naming the project an Original Motion Picture Score, Lars is making a small declaration - that the form is the point, that you can write a soundtrack to a film that lives only in the listener's head, and that the result still works as music.