After a four-year hiatus, the powerhouse K-pop septet BTS has returned with a new album, “Arirang,” a raucous test of its creative mettle amid rapidly changing genre norms.
After a four-year hiatus, the powerhouse K-pop septet BTS has returned with a new album, “Arirang,” a raucous test of its creative mettle amid rapidly changing genre norms, and a temperature check on the strength of Hybe, the conglomerate that has nurtured it for more than a decade.
After a four-year hiatus, the powerhouse K-pop septet BTS has returned with a new album, “Arirang,” a raucous test of its creative mettle amid rapidly changing genre norms; a temperature check on the strength of Hybe, the conglomerate that has nurtured it for more than a decade; and an intended beacon of Korean soft power globally.
Got all that? Upon this fragile 14-song base, whole economies teeter.
Throughout the 2010s, BTS set the high-water mark for K-pop’s worldwide spread with a hyperkinetic blend of sturdy hip-hop, lithe soul and punchy pop. The group collaborated widely — Coldplay, Nicki Minaj, Steve Aoki — and set the template for inviting stars from other universes, as well as their fans, into K-pop. Its success was musical, but also symbolic, an announcement of South Korea’s primacy on the global pop stage.
What BTS was not was idiosyncratic: There was too much riding on its success. And yet the version of the group — Jung Kook, RM, Jimin, V, J-Hope, Suga and Jin — that has reunited following each member’s mandatory military service is both more confident and more unusual than before. The songs on “Arirang” are blustery, roaring, throbbing, quirky and sometimes harried. They feel assembled for maximum bombast rather than carefully composed. Given the expectations that hover over it, “Arirang” doesn’t pander, and it doesn’t overwhelm. Rather, it feels borderline experimental, as close to risky as a project engineered for minimal risk can be.
The album’s first half is crunchy and industrial, packed with neo-boom-bap hip-hop that has novel twists. “Hooligan” cuts a 1940s-style movie soundtrack with the tense sizzle of a knife sharpening, a thrilling tug of war. The album opener, “Body to Body,” is bulbous and springy. “Fya” suggests a chase scene through a bondage club, full of thrums and thwacks.
The second half is comparatively brighter. The breezy “One More Night” suggests a modern update on new jack swing or speed garage, and the amiably chill “Please” takes its cues from late ’90s soul music. The album closer, “Into the Sun” — with its dueling plangent guitar and whistle, and a hook that could have been borrowed from Fountains of Wayne — is hypnotically soothing.
Though there is a dutiful division of labor among the members, overall “Arirang” is much more a showcase for the group’s rappers — RM, Suga, J-Hope — than its vocalists V, Jimin, Jin and Jung Kook. RM in particular is in his prime, a creative stylist comfortable bending his cadences into new shapes. Among the singers, V is the lustiest and the most powerful.
While BTS is rarely overtly sexual, its ferocity on “Like Animals” and “Body to Body” can’t be misunderstood. And while the group is rarely overtly tough, there are streaks of resistance — a promise to “Come back for what’s mine,” on “2.0” — and perhaps resentment, on the exceptional “Normal” (“Wish I had a minute just to turn me off”).
Even though the members of BTS have distinct singing and rapping voices, these productions feel like sturdy homes they’ve been dexterously shoehorned into. Rarely has an album been built more blatantly from component parts: You can almost hear the clicking of the drag-and-drop in the Pro Tools sessions — four bars of RM rapping here, a couple of lines of Jung Kook singing there. “Arirang” is an assembled puzzle — not an unimpressive one, but one all the same.
Alongside the longtime collaborator Pdogg, the music is guided by the club music eccentric Diplo, the Atlanta rap maximalist Mike Will Made-It, the Rosalía collaborator El Guincho and the pop mercenary Ryan Tedder. The songwriting includes some real surprises, like the unpredictable noise rapper Jpegmafia on “Fya,” the emo rager Teezo Touchdown on “Body to Body” and Ant Clemons, who’s worked with Ye, on “One More Night.” On the tender and peppy “Swim,” there’s a faint nod to Jason Derulo’s “Ridin’ Solo,” a similarly dreamy hit of 15 years ago. (The album’s only real dud is “Merry Go Round,” produced in part by Kevin Parker of Tame Impala.)
The album’s surlier first half and the comparatively pleasant back half are split by an interlude that’s simply the tolling of the Sacred Bell of Great King Seongdeok, one of South Korea’s National Treasures.
That, along with the album’s title, which refers to the defining Korean folk song sampled on “Body to Body,” are signals to BTS’s Korean audience that it understands itself as an extension of South Korean national culture. But while BTS is advertising itself as a heritage act, and a preserver of the country’s artistic lineage, it’s not thinking merely local: Around half of the lyrics here are in English, an acknowledgment of the album’s global ambition and also a byproduct of the group’s Western collaborators.
In the years since it released music as a group, as the members were putting out solo projects and serving as de facto ambassadors, K-pop sonically evolved — BTS’s hegemony bred pockets of counter-innovation that pointed ways forward for the industry in its absence.
BTS doesn’t need to innovate on “Arirang”; its commercial success is a fait accompli. The group’s comeback is a worldwide news event, and a prompt for astronomical ancillary industries in live music, merchandise and tourism. But what if, hiding underneath all of that disorienting success and the global businesses that rely on it, was a work of odd and satisfying art?
BTS “Arirang” (Big Hit)
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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