Every few years a small, homemade song ambles past the gatekeepers and ends up everywhere. “Those Eyes” by New West is one of those. It started life in 2019 as the opening track on a debut EP by a Toronto collective that hardly anyone had heard of, and then, thanks to TikTok and the strange alchemy of the internet, it grew into a global hit with streams in the hundreds of millions. What’s striking is that it isn’t flashy. It’s quiet, lo-fi and gentle. It’s a song about being looked at by someone who really sees you, and it turns out that’s a feeling a great many people were missing and eager to hear sung back to them.
Four Friends in Toronto
New West describe themselves as a collective rather than a conventional band, and the distinction tells you something about how they work. The group is made up of Kala Wita, Vella, Ben Key and Noel West, who came together in 2017. Noel and Ben are childhood friends, and Noel, an engineer and producer who had previously worked with artists such as Daniel Caesar, began collaborating with Kala, with Vella joining soon after. The result was a four-way partnership in which everybody plays several parts.
They’ve also stayed fiercely hands-on. Noel produces, mixes, engineers and masters their material himself, a do-it-yourself ethic that survived even after they signed to Republic Records in 2022. That insistence on keeping things in-house gives their music a distinctive, intimate texture. You can hear it in the way “Those Eyes” sounds like it was made in a bedroom by people who genuinely like each other, which, as it happens, is more or less what happened.
The members don’t even use their birth names professionally, which adds a little mystique to the whole enterprise. It’s a small detail, but it fits a group that prefers to let the music speak first and the biography second.
The First Song They Ever Wrote
Here’s the detail I find most charming. “Those Eyes” was the first song the four of them wrote together. According to the band, Kala arrived with the lyrics and the others worked out chords that felt right underneath, and the whole song grew from that starting point. There’s no committee smell about it, no sense of a track engineered to hit a target. It sounds like a conversation that turned into a melody.
It was released on 10 May 2019 as the first single from their debut EP, Call Me When You Hear This Song, which followed in June. At the time, it was one more promising indie release in an ocean of them. Nobody could have predicted that this modest, gentle tune would eventually carry the band onto late-night television and into the awards season.
So What Is the Song About?
The band has been refreshingly direct about the subject. They have said the track portrays the beginning of a relationship, the stage often called the “honeymoon phase”, when everything about a new person feels thrilling and every small moment seems enormous. That’s precisely the mood the song captures. It dwells on tiny intimacies: the secret joke that two people share in a crowded room, the laughter nobody else understands, the feeling of being completely seen.
The eyes of the title are the focal point, the place where all that tenderness gathers. Anyone who has fallen for somebody knows how a single glance can say more than a long speech. The song doesn’t attempt anything grand or poetic for its own sake. It simply lingers on the sweetness of early closeness, and by refusing to over-explain, it leaves plenty of room for the listener to fill in their own memories.
How TikTok Found It
For a while, the song’s success was something of a slow burn. It initially took off on TikTok, though the band themselves have admitted they’re not entirely sure where or how, and gradually that momentum spilled over to streaming platforms. A sped-up version, the kind that has become a staple of online music culture, helped push it further, racking up tens of millions of streams of its own.
I’ll confess I have mixed feelings about the sped-up craze, which often turns a lovely song into something that sounds like it’s being sung by hamsters. But I’ll concede that the format found a new audience for this one, and audiences matter. By late 2023, the band’s label was reporting more than 800 million streams worldwide. That’s a staggering figure for a track that started with a few friends and a couple of chords, and it shows how the internet can turn a private moment into a shared one.
The Sound: A Lullaby by the Campfire
Musically, “Those Eyes” is all about softness. Its lo-fi acoustic guitar, dreamy piano and lullaby-like melody create a warm, hazy atmosphere, the sort of thing you might hear at the exact moment in a romantic film when the lights go low and the leads finally stop talking. One reviewer likened it to a tender acoustic serenade with the sweeping emotion of Coldplay and the secluded intimacy of Bon Iver, which is a rather lovely way to put it.
The production keeps everything close and unforced. Nothing shouts, nothing strains. The vocals sit gently in the mix, and the arrangement leaves plenty of air around each instrument. It’s the opposite of a big, glossy pop production, and that simplicity is precisely why it cuts through. In a noisy world, a quiet song stands out.
Success on Their Own Terms
What happened next is just as interesting as the viral moment. Rather than chasing a repeat, New West steered in a bolder direction. Their 2023 debut album, Based on a True Story, leaned into big, anthemic, Britpop-flavoured songs, and band members have said they wanted to keep making music the way that had worked for them in the first place, not merely copy the hit. The original 2019 recording of “Those Eyes” still appears on the record, a nod to where everything began.
The accolades followed. They made their late-night television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, played shows around the world, and won the JUNO Award for Breakthrough Group of the Year in 2024. For a collective that began as a handful of friends experimenting in a studio, that’s quite a journey, and it all traces back to a quiet song about a look. Accepting that JUNO, they joked that they were a “very very famous TikTok band”, a line that captures their cheerfully self-aware attitude to the whole phenomenon.
Final Thoughts
“Those Eyes” proves that a song doesn’t need to be loud, complicated or heavily marketed to become a phenomenon. It simply needs to capture a feeling people recognise and give it a melody they can carry. New West took the giddy, fragile excitement of early love and wrapped it in soft guitar and gentle piano, and millions of strangers heard their own stories in it. Years later, it still sounds fresh, and it still works as a reminder that the most powerful moments are often the smallest: a glance, a shared laugh, and someone who understands you without being told. It’s a small song with a very large heart.