For their eighth mini-album, TOMORROW X TOGETHER, aka TXT, puts their all-important seventh year at the center of their concept. In K-pop, seven years is an important length of time. Under Korea’s standard entertainment contract, the length of an exclusive contract tops out at seven years. When TXT, the five-member group that debuted in 2019 as the Big Hit successors to BTS, renewed their contracts in 2025, they resisted the so-called seven-year curse. 7TH YEAR: A Moment of Stillness in the Thorns is a chronicle of that resilience. The album’s lead single, “Stick With You,” may be about holding on to an increasingly distant lover, but the emotional electropop track doubles as a comment on Soobin, Yeonjun, Beomgyu, Taehyun, and Hueningkai’s commitment to TXT: “I’ll add one day after another to make a lifetime/Please stay by my side/Just like always.” The moment of stillness amidst thorns is purely figurative here, of course, as TXT leans into thumping electronic rhythms across a majority of the album’s six tracks. The members give themselves over to a dreamy, club-set escape on “Take Me to Nirvana” (featuring Chinese rapper Vinida Weng) and get grungy on “Dream of Mine.” But it’s the easy irreverence of “So What” that is the most direct about the album’s career-focused inspirations: “It doesn’t matter if opinions are a bit divided, so what/It doesn’t matter if my efforts betray me, so what/It doesn’t matter, we just do it, the music we want to make … The climax, the ending isn’t here yet.”