Now that RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook have all returned from South Korea’s mandatory military service, BTS is finally back with ARIRANG, their first work as a group since 2022. The album’s namesake is a Korean folk song on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, submitted in two separate entries by North and South Korea. “Arirang” gets sampled towards the end of “Body to Body,” the album’s first track. “I need…,” j-hope pleads repeatedly in the intro of the song, over an ominously building instrumental. After a few repetitions, the instrumental drops out and RM finishes j-hope’s sentence. “I need the whole stadium to jump,” he commands. Having been lucky enough to secure a ticket to their upcoming tour, I am certain that “Body to Body” will be the concert opener. If the audience manages to coordinate a jump on beat, the landing will be thunderous.
When listening to the fourteen tracks on ARIRANG in order, it feels natural to conceptualize the album into two parts. The first five, “Body to Body,” “Hooligan,” “Aliens,” “FYA,” and “2.0,” are hard-hitting, featuring punchy beats and intentionally discordant samples. Among these, “Aliens,” angry and braggadocious, directly speaks out about BTS’s racialized experience upon making it big in the West. Then, there is a built-in pause. “No. 29” consists of a single toll of the Bell of King Seongdeok, which rings out for exactly one minute and thirty-eight seconds. Though perhaps a seemingly strange choice on first listen, the moment adds to the album’s experimental feel. While listening to the bell’s sound fade, I was reminded of explorations of meditation and hypnosis by the avant-garde video artist Nam June Paik, whose works RM and I both admire. Like Paik’s absurdist, electronics-infused art, ARIRANG seems at times to be in the business of connecting cultural heritage and futurity in new and surprising ways.
Not everything in ARIRANG sticks the landing. Following “No. 29” is a series of mellower, moodier songs, some of which feel stagnant. In contrast to the first half, which prominently showcases the talents of rappers RM, SUGA, and j-hope, these tracks seem more melodic. Unfortunately, the vocal processing does the opposite of enhancing Jin, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook’s vocals. Perhaps these are creative choices rather than true blunders—“Into the Sun,” for instance, seems intentional in filtering the vocalists through a vocoder to achieve a robotic sound. But just listen to the four vocalists’ talents on songs like “Lie” (Jimin’s solo on BTS’s 2016 album Wings), “Stigma” (V’s solo on Wings), “Nothing Without Your Love” (from Jin’s solo EP Echo), and “Still With You” (a solo single of Jung Kook’s) for a glimpse of the range ARIRANG is missing.
The first song in this second half, “SWIM,” is accompanied by a music video featuring the seven members of BTS alongside Lili Reinhart, all dressed in vaguely historical (perhaps late nineteenth or early twentieth century, definitely Western) attire and inexplicably stuck on a boat together. The “SWIM” music video illustrates another problem with ARIRANG as a whole: despite alluding to vibrant cultural heritages and entanglements across time, the storytelling falls short of meaningfully exploring them. For instance, the album title and promotional materials draw a parallel between the seven members of BTS and seven Korean college students who attended Howard University at the end of the nineteenth century, where they contributed to the first recording of “Arirang.” Notably, the seven college students, who allegedly all hailed from noble families, were welcomed by Howard, an HBCU, but not by other American universities at the time. Had BTS chosen to lean further into that history, they could have engaged more deeply with the past and present of racial exclusion and othered-ness, grappling with the complexities of Black and Asian solidarity and BTS’s own star status in a genre that owes much to Black music traditions. Alas, we did not get to see these stories come to life in the studio nor on screen.
In the spring of 2020, a few months before BTS released their chart-topping English hit “Dynamite,” the song I had on repeat as I wallowed in my room during lockdown was “Spring Day” from You Never Walk Alone (2017), a repackage of Wings. Widely considered one of the band’s best songs, “Spring Day” is beautiful and angst-ridden, conveying loss, disillusionment, and defiant hope. The song’s music video and the repackage album’s title both reference Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which dwells on the loss of innocence and reckonings with buried injustices. Having been haunted by Le Guin’s piece since reading it the summer before high school, I took BTS’s engagement with it as a definite sign that the band’s socially conscious and introspective creative voice is one worth listening to. If I had to point to a specific song that made me a member of the so-called BTS ARMY, “Spring Day” would be it.
ARIRANG is by no means a bad album. It’s wonderfully experimental, and the members are clearly keen on flexing new creative muscles. But having listened to BTS for a long time, I know they can go bolder and deeper in their music and storytelling than they did here. My enduring love for their previous work convinces me that they are capable of better.
