Taekook’s breathy opening verse, followed by Suga and J-Hope’s laidback rhymes, all feel like someone whispering at you across your pillow. There’s a confessional quality to this number, not only because members of the group co-wrote it - the band co-wrote the entire album - but because BTS’s gorgeous vocals are often the melodic equivalent of an ASMR session. After all, even though the boys say, “I am singing by myself,” they’re still all singing together. Even the album’s lush ballad “ Blue & Grey” maintains this feeling of warm energy, although it’s explicitly about dealing with depression and pandemic-induced loneliness. Each of Be’s eight tracks, including album-closer “Dynamite” and a spoken-word skit in which they poke fun at themselves for being chart-toppers, comes across like a personal reminder that we’re all in this together. But Be stays airy, even when its lyrics are moody. Here as always, BTS frankly discuss things like mental health and the pressure that goes along with fame. The band’s thematic material will be familiar to fans. This is pop music as meditation, as solace, as an expression of faith. There’s a faint gospel vibe to both these songs - they wouldn’t feel out of place in, say, a Charlie Puth collaboration - that sets the stage for everything to come. “ Fly to My Room” is next, a jaunty song with a cute Ariana Grande-ish vibe that’s all about turning your room into a fantasy world tour because you’re stuck inside and can’t leave. It’s a sweet, singable song that finds positivity in simplicity - about what you’d expect from a collaboration with songwriter Antonina Armato, who incidentally also wrote the best song ever written: “Bet On It” from High School Musical 2. One by one, the other band members join in, singing good-naturedly about how even though they miss company and activity, even though they’re pursued by melancholy, one day life will return to normal. He’s intercut with shots of Jungkook glancing wistfully outside his window, as they both reminisce about how “one day the world stopped.” Its theme - the pandemic - is immediately obvious from the accompanying music video, which was directed by band member Jeon Jungkook and opens with a lonely V (Kim Taehyung) driving down a mostly empty highway. With “Dynamite,” BTS beat the US music industry at its own cheap gameīe opens with the band’s newest single, “ Life Goes On,” which dropped at midnight on Friday alongside the album itself. In that sense, the album’s auditory shift toward total pop feels like a completely necessary response to a very difficult year - and indeed, it’s intended to be. It’s okay to rest, it says: to simply exist, to survive, to be. BigHit/Weiboīe is both a proclamation and a promise. As many parts of the US are reentering states of crisis, Be is like a deliberate road map for how we can all get through the next few months: singalongs, good humor, and reliance on the bonds that keep us close.

And that’s fine, because the album’s message seems to be about staying light, upbeat, and grasping hope wherever possible. The band’s harder, more anthemic sound, which put them on the map and landed their fantastic single “On” at the fourth spot on the Billboard Hot 100 in February, is absent here. Musically, Be is pure pop, all the way down - a loudly retro mix of pop sounds ranging from frothy to funky, melancholic to mellow, filtered through a lens of determined positivity. Taken as a whole, they form a seamless litany of bops intended to commemorate and celebrate getting through the Covid-19 pandemic. So when BTS announced a new album, the question loomed about what kind of album Be would, uh, be: whether it would venture still further away from their previous musical and collaborative styles, or represent a return to their typical mix of rock and hip-hop with the occasional lighter pop thrown in.īe is a short album, with just seven new tracks alongside “Dynamite.” But nearly all of them are sublime.

It was in many ways a major departure from their typical approach to their craft. “Dynamite,” not incidentally BTS’s first single entirely in English, seemed to be born out of a recognition that the band was somehow too complex to get American radio play.

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