BTS made a comeback with their fourth extended play, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. The group's third extended play, The Most Beautiful Moment in Life, Pt. All of their Japanese singles-"No More Dream", released on June 4 "Boy in Luv", released on July 16 and "Danger", released on November 19-made it into the top 10 of the Oricon Albums Chart as well as the Japan Hot 100.
To wrap up 2014, BTS made their Japanese debut in December 2014 with first Japanese studio album Wake Up. It was their first album to break into the US Top Heatseekers chart. BTS released their first studio album, Dark & Wild in August 2014. A repackaged version of the album, Skool Luv Affair Special Addition was released in May 2014. This marked the first time their album charted on the Billboard World Albums chart, and Japan's Oricon Albums Chart. In February 2014, BTS released their second extended play, Skool Luv Affair. They made a comeback in September 2013 with an extended play, O!RUL8,2?. The group debuted in South Korea on June 13, 2013, with the single album 2 Cool 4 Skool. As of April 2020, BTS has sold over 20 million physical albums in less than 7 years, making them the best-selling Korean act of all time. In December 2018, BTS surpassed 10 million albums sold, setting the record for reaching the 10 million milestone in the shortest span of time (5½ years) among all Korean acts to have debuted since 2000, with 5 million of those albums being sold in South Korea in 2018 alone.
South Korean boy group BTS has released nine studio albums (one of which was reissued under a different title), six compilation albums, and six extended plays. And he did it in ARMY’s name.Top(left): Jimin, RM, Jungkook Bottom(left): J-hope, V, Suga, Jin On his 25th birthday, he donated nearly $20,000 of it to orphanages. SUGA once promised that if he got rich, he would buy his fans beef-a luxury in Korea. In 2017, they partnered with UNICEF in a campaign to protect young people from violence the next year, their fans raised over $1 million in an effort to alleviate childhood malnutrition. (The video to their 2016 track “Blood Sweat & Tears” is, if not the only music video in history to feature both a coordinated dance routine and a quote from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian, certainly the only one to have been watched more than half a billion times.)īut for as dense as the band’s mythology can get, their presence remains simple, clear, and uplifting. More than just developing a brand, BTS crafted a rich, reference-heavy alternate universe that invoked things like Jungian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean philosophy-not your most bankable teen-pop references. The official name of their fans (the ARMY), is an acronym for “Adorable Representative MC for Youth.” But the subtext is clear: These are people willing to fight for what they believe.įormed in 2010 by K-pop impresario Bang Si-hyuk, the group-V, j-hope, RM, Jin, Jimin, Jungkook, and SUGA-swiftly became not only one of the biggest groups in South Korea (and eventually the best-selling artists in the country’s history), but an emblem for K-pop’s migration into mainstream global pop-a feat made even more impressive by the fact that the band sings almost entirely in Korean. But they also represent the power of pop music-simple, catchy pop music-as a force for social transformation, touching on subjects-mental health, LGBTQ identity, class inequity-taboo not just in their native South Korea but in the sunshine-and-rainbows world of mass-market culture generally. Yes, they have cool haircuts and their outfits always match in an interesting way. Calling BTS a boy band is a little like calling a computer a typewriter with a screen.