BTS continues to surprise us, hitting the world with another first: a song that’s performed fully in English.
BTS will simultaneously release the digital single ‘Dynamite’ sound source and music video to the world at 1 pm (Korean time) on the 21st.
It is a new song that is released six months after the 4th regular album ‘Map of the Soul: 7’released in February.
While the K-pop group, with members RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, V, Jimin and Jungkook, has dropped some English lyrics in their songs before, “Dynamite” (out Aug. 21) will be their first song performed completely in English.
Dynamite’ is a bright and cheerful disco-pop genre song, and the agency Big Hit Entertainment introduced that it has a refreshing melody with strong addiction.
BTS is familiar with breaking new ground. The septet, which launched in 2013 with the song “No More Dream” from the debut album “2 Cool 4 Skool,” were the first K-pop group to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 200 in 2018. Their 2019 album “Map of the Soul: Persona” topped the Nielsen charts in physical sales for the year and they performed at the 2020 Grammys with Lil Nas X. In their seven years, they’ve put out more than a dozen albums and EPs.
The most difficult part of making “Dynamite” was stepping out of the comforts of singing in Korean and getting the English pronunciations down, the group tells USA TODAY via an interpreter.
“It was more not hard, but interesting. It was an interesting kind of challenge,” Jungkook says, with RM noting that it was a “fun hard.”
Though BTS told Entertainment Weekly in 2019 that they didn’t plan to sing in English because they didn’t want to change their “identity” or “genuineness,” no one planned on a global pandemic either. Things change.
“This is a situation that everybody else around the world is facing, so we just started to explore what can we do right now, what can we do really good?” Suga says of “Dynamite.”
Creating the song was “like destiny,” RM says. “Who would ever think of this pandemic? No meeting, no karaoke, no concerts? Even no walking in the park. So we never expected this song would come fully in English. During the process of making our album … it just came to us.”
BTS has an incredible international following, with a legion of fans known as the Army. But the group has been largely overlooked when it comes to air time on U.S. radio stations because their songs are in Korean. “Dynamite” could propel them to a No. 1 hit if it gets picked up by American radio stations.
Will it be their last English song? Though they don’t have plans to release another, “don’t look forward to it,” V says.
Like much of the world, the pandemic has taken a toll on BTS members’ personal lives. They’re not able to do the things they loved pre-pandemic, like concerts and karaoke, but they’re trying to do the best under the circumstances.
“We’re in this situation that we have, what is it that can lift me up?” J-Hope says. “The conclusion is always going to be music and dance that lifts me up, so I’ve been trying to listen to music, I’ve been trying to write music, dance and that’s what I’ve been doing to cope with the situation.”
Jin says he’s taking the pandemic as an opportunity to do the things he couldn’t do before: “It was a chance for me to sort of bringing on new challenges for myself and try new things and that’s how I sort of try to cope.”
SOURCE: USA TODAY Entertainment