When RM is going through an existential crisis, which is pretty often, he might think of the words of Rainer Maria Rilke, or maybe the lyrics of Tyler, the Creator. BTS’ leader loves that other poetically inclined RM, and keeps coming back to an oft-quoted section of his 1905 poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”: “Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final.” In other words, just swim.
Lying in his cold army bunk, scalp buzzed close, struggling with 18 unrelenting months of insomnia during mandatory military service, RM would listen to Don Toliver, to Playboi Carti, to Dijon’s debut, to Joji’s ballad “Past Won’t Leave My Bed.” When the lyrics got his brain humming with too many ideas for his own, he’d switch to streaming classical and ambient music. But he really latched onto Tyler’s “Darling, I,” and the chorus phrase “Forever is too long.” Tyler and Teezo Touchdown were singing about dodging monogamy at all costs, but RM teased out his own, deeper meaning. “Maybe at that time, the military felt too long for me,” RM says. “I just kept singing the phrase all the time. And I was being healed just by singing along to it.”
His time in the military strained his mental health, leaving him in what he describes as an internal “cave.” But no feeling was final, and it wasn’t forever. On a sunless mid-February Saturday in Seoul, South Korea, he’s back with his six bandmates. They’re hanging out in a warehouse-like studio space in the towering midcity headquarters of Hybe, the ever-more-global music conglomerate originally built, for the most part, on BTS’ own singular success. It’s a sort of friendly pop-music Death Star, gleaming and metallic, where lobby guards intercept visitors with an intensity certain U.S. pop stars could only dream about, and employees upstairs proffer NDAs on clipboards. Even the bathrooms are futuristically secure, guarded by sliding electronic doors that require ID cards for both entrance and, for some reason, egress.
“These 14 tracks could be an answer to the people wondering, ‘What is BTS in 2026?’”
With BTS in the building, though, who could blame them? The slightest change in the band’s perceived fortunes can move Hybe’s stock price, but that’s the least of it. It’s nearly impossible to overstate the group’s importance to its city and its nation, which changed military-conscription rules in 2020 with BTS in mind, though all seven members went on to enlist anyway. If you’re lucky enough to fly into Seoul, you’ll only go a few minutes before spotting V in a tank top on a highway billboard promoting a local coffee brand. For their city-stopping free concert here, BTS will walk to the stage via the King’s Road, following the path of five centuries of monarchs.
Five weeks before the release of Arirang, BTS’ first album of all-new material in nearly six years, RM is living out his favorite poem again. (His bandmate Jimin scrawled different Rilke verses on his chest for a music video in 2023. BTS are just that kind of band.) “I have extreme stress and extreme joy at the same time,” RM says. “And it’s all always back and forth, back and forth every time, every night.” He’s wearing a shiny black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, chunky boots, and oversized parachute pants you’d have to be a member of BTS to pull off. His hair is frosted at the tips, carefully tousled; his eyes are alert, amused, ever-probing. RM was originally headed for a more academic life, and it’s easy to imagine him as a very popular young professor in various other timelines, presumably in the chunky glasses he already wears off-duty.
RM is always asking himself questions, and in recent years, he’s had a long list of them about his group. What should they sound like? What do they stand for? Should they continue onward? It would be easy for him to say that Arirang settles all of those queries, but he’s too compulsively truthful for that. “I’m still really confused,” he says, “and that’s what we figured out after the military.” He thought maybe there’d be “some precise, sharp consensus that we could all relate to, which was not very true.” So the picture is “still blurry,” he adds, but “these 14 tracks could be an answer to the people wondering, ‘What is BTS in 2026?’”
Either way, his anxiety persists: “I really wanna pretend like, ‘I’m OK and I’m ready, all decided, everything’s great, I just can’t wait.’ I really wanna say that, but even more than that, I really wanna be honest.”
With a trio of English-language singles in 2020 and 2021 — “Dynamite,” “Butter,” and “Permission to Dance” — BTS completed the long process of conquering the world, to a degree no group from South Korea, or anywhere in Asia, had ever managed. But part of RM seemed to wonder if the world had also conquered BTS in the process. They had previously been deeply involved in writing their own material, had always kept most of their lyrics in their native tongue, and started out making aggro hip-hop tracks, not smooth disco pop. “I didn’t know what kind of group we were anymore,” he admitted in 2022, just before the group began a yearslong break they’d fill with military service and solo hits. “I don’t know what kind of story I should tell now.”
Later that year, in a conversation with Pharrell Williams for RS, RM went further. “I was just a small rapper and lyricist when I was young,” he told Williams. “It was 10 years, really intense as a team. I got to stop this for a bit. I got to shut it down and fall away from it and then just see what’s going on…. Sometimes I really feel afraid. Like, what if I don’t like music anymore?” Williams told him it was temporary, and offered parting advice that unintentionally echoed Rilke’s: “Just keep going.” Much later, in a livestream that had him subsequently apologizing for excessive candor, RM admitted what he had been hinting at: “I’ve thought tens of thousands of times whether disbanding or pausing the team would be better.”
J-Hope, the group’s emotional backbone, a fierce rapper rivaled only by the formally trained Jimin as the dancing-est member, was circling the same doubt. “Is getting all this love and attention actually a good thing?” J-Hope says now, recalling his feelings. “Maybe while everyone is clapping and cheering for me, I should just turn it all off. And I wondered whether I wanted this. All I had was a tiny flame inside of me, and it had just spread like wildfire. I felt a lot of pressure around that.” In 2022, he became the first BTS member to release a full-fledged solo album, Jack in the Box, which posed the question directly: “Do I put out the fire or burn brighter?”
J-Hope chose the latter option, though he wasn’t sure he really had a choice. “I realized it’s probably not something I can stop just because I want to stop it,” he tells me. “Personally, I’m very affected by the people around me, so I have to think about whether I can handle the emotional effect my decisions will have on so many others. In the end, I felt that keeping the flame burning is what I truly want, and the choice that’s most authentically me.”
The third member of the group’s rap line, the cerebral, mysteriously charismatic Suga, isn’t sure there was ever a question. “There’s no way for me to know everyone’s individual thoughts and desires,” he says, “but we all went solo because we couldn’t work in a group at the time. So before going into the military, I knew we were always gonna get back together. But I can see how it could be surprising from a foreign perspective. But for us, staying together just felt obvious. So, nobody really had opinions about that. I just thought, ‘Yeah, of course we’re doing this.’”
“For us, staying together just felt obvious. So, nobody really had opinions about that. I just thought, ‘Yeah, of course we’re doing this.’”
RM did at least decide on a mandate for Arirang, which turned out to be an artistic and commercial triumph, selling 641,000 copies in the U.S. alone in its first week and topping Apple Music’s charts in 115 countries. “I’ve been saying to the members, ‘If we don’t challenge anymore, then I think there’s no reason that we should keep doing this as a team,’” he says. “We have to show the world that we are still ongoing and still exploring. It’s so complicated sometimes. But still, I think we have to push it to the edge even more, even more, and it’s still not enough.” He smiles at his own intensity.
In October 2022, all seven members of BTS, in matching purple hoodies, grasped hands and took a deep, synchronized bow as fireworks flooded the sky above the seaside city of Busan. As they walked offstage, V held aloft a laminated sign with the same message in both English and Korean, from the lyrics of the song they had just performed: “Best moment is yet to come.” They waved to their fans, trying to look upbeat. Jimin lingered at the front of the stage, eyes shimmering. It was the last time BTS would perform together in public for four years.
Jin is the eldest at 33, sardonically charming, with a rich, pure tenor and a commanding stage presence. It sometimes seems like he has entirely unwarranted impostor syndrome about his place in the group – he jokes that his one advantage is that he’s “more good-looking than the other members.” He was the first to enlist in the military, shortly after releasing the soaring Coldplay collaboration “The Astronaut.” As an assistant drill sergeant, he bought extra food for his troops, and they grew to love him, weeping when his time was over. He cried, too, at his discharge ceremony. Once he was out, he carried the Olympic torch at the Paris Games, starred in a hit Netflix variety show, and released two excellent EPs that continued to lean into the rock sounds he had come to love, mostly through his longstanding Coldplay fandom.
But the whole time, he wanted to find his way back to the band. “I just missed the other members so much,” he says. “I’ve always thought there’s no reason to continue if it’s not with the group. I guess a solo career is just not that important to me. If I did anything, it would be trying something different within the group when the fans are bored. I’m not interested in acting or anything like that.”
“Now that we’re back together, the other members are filling in any gaps that I feel in my expression, in my performance. In a lot of ways, I realized that this is why there were seven of us.”
In 2023, Suga released his first official album under his alter ego, Agust D (the name is Suga backward, plus the initials of his hometown crew, D-Town), after two mixtapes that pushed boundaries with edgy personal confessions. This time, on “Amygdala,” he raps about dealing with his parents’ illnesses and other traumas, but declares himself liberated from the past: “What didn’t kill me only made me stronger/And I begin to bloom like a lotus flower once again.” Apparently due to a circa-2012 motorcycle accident that once left him unable to lift his arms onstage, his military service took place in the civilian world, where he spent 21 months as a social worker. “After that final album, I don’t have any negative feelings left in my body,” he says. He also got over a fear of running out of lyrics he had confessed to in 2022. “I’ve been focusing on stressing less about it. I’m always going to find things to say, and then run out of them again. There’s an eternal cycle.”
Before enlisting, J-Hope headlined Lollapalooza in July 2022, becoming the first South Korean artist to do so at a major American festival. “I felt like I was stuck in some kind of mold that kept me from expressing myself as freely as I wanted to,” he says. “I yearned to break that mold and step into the world with my true self and all of the music that I wanted to share. But now that I’ve made more of my own music, challenged myself, I wouldn’t say that I’m in a box anymore. Now, I’m wondering, what can I create now that I’m outside of the box?” At the same time, he’s reminded himself of the power of his group: “Now that we’re back together, the other members are filling in any gaps that I feel in my expression, in my performance. In a lot of ways, I realized that this is why there were seven of us.”
Read the full story from Rolling Stone’s May 2026 Special Issue on rollingstone.com.
Photographs by PAK BAE
Styling by YEJIN KIM
Hair by HANSOM, HWAYEON, AND HYUNWOO LEE
Makeup by DAREUM KIM AND SHINAE
Set design byYEABYUL JEON
Produced by NUHANA
Executive Producer: SOOH HWANG
Producers: SEBIN PARK AND KALY NGO
Line producer: CHERRY LEE
Digital Technician: HUIJIN KIM
Photographic Assistance: SOOJUNG OH, MINHYUK LEE, MINJUN KIM, JIHYUN OH, JUWAN KANG, AND JUNHYUNG YANG
Set Design Team: SOHYUN WON, YUNSEON CHOI, JUNHYUK SIM
RS Video DoP: MIKE BEECH
Camera Operators: BYEONG HWI MIN, CHURL GWON, HYUNSUH PAIK
DIT: JIWOON LEE
Sound operator: MIN JAE LEE
Production assistant: SEOHYUN YOON
GROUP COVER CLOTHING CREDITS
V: Jacket by Simone Rocha. Shirt by Ami. Pants by Maison Margiela. Jewelry by Celine and Cartier.
Suga: Jacket by Enfants Riches Déprimés. Shirt by SSSTEIN. Jewelry by Werkstatt München.
Jin: Shirt by Rick Owens. Jewelry by Fred.
Jung Kook: Outfit by Calvin Klein Collection. Bracelet by Werkstatt München. Watch by Hublot.
RM: (White outfit) Outfit by Taekh. Shirt by Ann Demeulemeester.
RM: (Black outfit)Outfit by Rick Owens. Shoes by Guidi. Necklace by Werkstatt München
Jimin: Jacket by John Lawrence Sullivan. Hoodie by Our Legacy. Pants and jewelry by Dior.
J-Hope: Jacket byJuun.J. Shirt by Post Archive Faction. Watch by Audemars Piguet. Rings by Louis Vuitton. Necklace by SCHO.
SOLO CLOTHING CREDITS
J-Hope: Jacket and shoes by Louis Vuitton. Watch by Audemars Piguet.
Jimin: Outfit and jewelry by Dior.
Jin: Jacket by Sonia Carrasco. Shirt by Ann Demeulemeester. Pants and shoes by Gucci.
Jung Kook Jacket by Acne Studios. Shirts by Dries Van Noten and Acne Studios. Pants by Diesel.
RM: Suit by John Lawrence Sullivan. Shirt by Goomheo. Shoes by Guidi.
V: Jacket by BONBOM. Sweater by SSSTEIN. Pants by Maison Margiela.
Suga: Jacket by Hyacyn Ny. Shirt by Lemaire.
