Chapter 7: The Weight of Expectations

There's always pressure. No matter how many times you've succeeded, no matter how many fans you have, there's always the weight of expectation hanging over you. For Stray Kids, the pressure was something we had learned to live with, but it never got any easier. The bigger we got, the higher the stakes, and the more we had to prove.

When we started working on Hope, we knew that we had set a high bar for ourselves. We had released some of our best music, and the expectations for the next album were sky-high. At times, the weight of it all felt suffocating. We wanted to make sure that we delivered, but we also didn't want to lose sight of why we were doing this in the first place. We were making music because we loved it, because it was a way for us to connect with our fans, and because we wanted to create something that mattered.

The pressure to meet expectations never really goes away, but we learned to cope with it. We learned to focus on the process, not the outcome. Instead of worrying about how the album would be received, we put all our energy into making the best music we could. We reminded ourselves that, at the end of the day, the only expectation that truly mattered was our own. And if we were proud of the album, if we knew that we had given everything to it, then that was enough.