BTS: Arirang Review – The biggest pop group in the world is back with stupid fun and total weirdness | BTS

TThe general consensus seems to be that as BTS’s commercial stock soars into the stratosphere — more than 500 million units have been sold worldwide, including more than 104 billion streams, making them the best-selling Asian act of all time — the actual music has become increasingly irrelevant. Before they took a hiatus in 2022 to fulfill their mandatory military service in South Korea, their English-language hits like Dynamite and Butter — despite their huge international successes — had stifled the K-pop idiosyncrasies that permeated their earlier material. By the 2020 double whammy of Map of the Soul: 7 and Be, the band’s early years as a hip-hop-focused collective were a distant memory, and thanks to their studio roster and more Western sound, their identity had also become that of a Korean act.

On the long-awaited Arirang – named after a Korean folk song dating back to 1896, which carries the slogan “Born in Korea, Playing for the World” – the band members are doing their best to right these wrongs. Most importantly, it manages to capture the spirit of experimentation in K-pop while incorporating it into a series of memorable hooks. And when Western collaborators are brought in, they’re interestingly heterogeneous, including outsider rapper-producer Jpegmafia, and producer El Guincho, known for his work with Björk and Rosalía.

The opening three songs split into two different moods, instantly reinstating rapper RM as the band’s guiding creative force. Over a fluid, Diplo-assisted beat that recalls Timbaland’s gonzo work over Nelly Furtado’s Loose, RM, Suga, and J-Hope’s vocals, it’s as if they’re having a lot of fun weaving in and out of the opening Body to Body tempo changes, echo-laden drums, and bits of processed vocals. They are also skilled at experimenting with the metal Hooligan, where El Guincho creates a beat from what sounds like swords sharpening on steel. It answers the question of what a Sophie-produced BTS might look like. Even the dense beats of US rap production giant Mike Will Made-It make sense on Crispy Aliens, while the delightfully swaggering 2.0 track (“You know how we do… we’re back to what’s mine”) can be read as a warning to the K-pop bands that rushed to replace BTS during their hiatus.

But BTS, and their financiers Big Hit Music, also realize that a softer side is key for any boy band. Swim’s lead single, sung only in English, performs relatively live and should be a global No. 1 until around November. Evoking Troye Sivan’s light-hearted pop, in classic BTS style, its somewhat primal lyric about spotting a sexy girl in the sea is repurposed in the accompanying material to focus on “the resolve to keep swimming forward through life’s many ebbs and flows.” Having claimed that their previous albums were about philosophical concepts touching on Jungian theory and the work of Hermann Hesse, such intellectual modernization does them a disservice. A lot of Arirang songs are big, stupid pop fun and all the best for it. When they dig deeper, as on the Kevin Parker-produced Merry Go Round — perhaps a frequent treadmill of fame — the lightness of his lyrical touch leaves room for real emotion. Like Animals, which sounds like Diplo producing Pixies, continues the more reflective mood of the second half, balancing Jung Kook’s soft tone with a processed guitar solo.

At 14 songs, things taper off a bit when themes start to repeat – the ballad “They Don’t Know Our Bottom” repeats the 2.0 situation to less interesting effect – but there’s also time for another surprise. It was mixed with sound effects and stripped back to replicate the band’s live jam session, bringing it closer to the sun. While their lyric “I’ll follow you to the sun” can be read as a nod to their loyal fans, or to each other, their enigmatic style and robotic voice add an eerie edge that sounds almost lethal. “Nobody knows me,” they hum, which seems appropriate. BTS is too big to fail now, and big enough to want to protect their inner lives at every turn. In Arirang, they’ve created an album that cements their status as the biggest pop phenomenon on the planet, and that’s more than enough.