BTS, the Best (stylized in all caps) is the upcoming third Japanese-language compilation album by South Korean boy band BTS. It is set to be released on June 16, 2021.
On the occasion of their 8th debut anniversary, K-pop boyband BTS has announced a special gift for Japanese AMRYs. Amid rumours of a surprise album on 'ARMY Day' on July 9, it is being reported that BTS will drop their new Japanese Album titled- BTS: The Best for fans in June.
The record, titled ‘BTS, The Best’, will be the group’s third Japanese compilation album. It is set to release on June 16. It will include a total of 23 songs across two CDs, including the Japanese versions of their hits from 2017 onwards. The Grammy-nominated single ‘Dynamite’ will also feature as a bonus track.
According to BTS' official Twitter handle in Japan, the boys will release a mix of their songs all the way back from 2017 as a special gift for Japanese ARMYs days after their June 13 debut anniversary. This compilation album will feature 23 tracks on 2 CDs including hit songs like 'Dynamite' which will get an acoustic remix and Japanese versions of their songs DNA, Black Swan, Spring Day, all compiled from their older albums.
BTS The Best Album Tracklist
Here are the songs which have made it to the BTS The Best Album track list:
M1. Film out
M2. DNA -Japanese ver.-
M3. Best Of Me -Japanese ver.-
M4. Lights
M5. è¡€、æ±—、涙 -Japanese ver.-
M6. FAKE LOVE -Japanese ver.-
M7. Black Swan -Japanese ver.-
M8. Airplane pt.2 -Japanese ver.-
M9. Go Go -Japanese ver.-
M10. IDOL -Japanese ver.-
M11. Dionysus -Japanese ver.-
M12. MIC Drop -Japanese ver.-
-Bonus Track-
M13. Dynamite
M1. Boy With Luv -Japanese ver.-
M2. Stay Gold
M3. Let Go
M4. Spring Day -Japanese ver.-
M5. ON -Japanese ver.-
M6. Don't Leave Me
M7. Not Today -Japanese ver.-
M8. Make It Right -Japanese ver.-
M9. Your eyes tell
M10. Crystal Snow
BTS 8th anniversary
Apart from the BTS The Best Album release date, the band has also divulged details of their yearly MUSTER celebrations on June 13-14. The annual celebrations called 'BTS Muster' is held to commemorate Bangtan Boys' debut date. This year, the BTS Muster 2021 theme is Sowoozoo aka 'Mikrokosmos' which draws its name from the boyband's sixth mini-album Map of the Soul: Persona.
Apart from their older tracks, BTS' third Japanese compilation album will feature 'Film Out', the highly-popular track which the group's youngest Jungkook has worked on in collaboration with Japanese pop-rock act Back Number. BTS The Best Album release date is slated for June 16, three days after BTS 8th anniversary,
When the pandemic struck, BTS were busy promoting their album ‘Map Of The Soul: 7’ and putting together a stadium world tour. A week after those scrapped dates were meant to kick off in Seoul, leader RM unexpectedly appeared on a livestream on the band’s YouTube channel with an announcement: they’d be using this sudden free time to make a new album.
Read more: Everything we learned from BTS’ blockbuster ‘BE’ global press conference
As time ticked past, more livestreams followed, giving fans a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes process as the new record was crafted. The seven-piece divvied up the jobs needed to produce it – musically and beyond – and shared conversations about how to respond to the global crisis that had the world in a vice.
Seven months later, ‘BE (Deluxe Edition)’ emerges as the most accurate musical encapsulation of the rollercoaster that is pandemic life so far; one minute brimming with joy, the next listless and miserable, another swinging slowly back to a neutral baseline. The band’s expressed aim is for the record to spread comfort, but, in an early vlog where the members discussed ideas and themes for the album, singer Jimin warned: “Even something intended to be consoling can make someone feel worse.” Over seven songs (and one skit), BTS strike the perfect balance between encouragement and reassurance, and sharing in the dark cloud of everyday struggle Covid-19 has cast over us.
They do so through honest, candid songwriting and the sincerity that has always shone through in BTS’ music. ‘Life Goes On’ – a central motif for the album – depicts the lingering frustrations of everything but time having been frozen. “There’s no end in sight / Is there a way out? / My feet refuse to move,” sighs V, the track gently glistening beneath him. Instead of dwelling on what they can’t control, though, they return their focus to hope: “Like an echo in the forest / The day will come back around / As if nothing happened / Yeah – life goes on.”
Much of ‘BE’ finds the band trying to find something to cling onto, clutching at small moments of happiness wherever it can find them. On the bright, retro pop of ‘Fly To My Room’, punctuated by big lashes of ‘70s piano, Jimin, J-hope, V and Suga celebrate being able to travel – through their memories, Zoom, and TV. “The TV sound makes it feel busy and crowded as if I’m out in the downtown,” raps J-hope. “Your mind can be changed by your mind.”
‘Blue & Grey’’s redemptive arc is longer, lower and harder to spot. The most devastating song on the album, it details “unease and gloom” in terms that are crushingly vulnerable. “Don’t say it’s OK / Because it’s not,” sing Jimin and V in unison, voices dripping with desperate emotion. “Please don’t leave me alone / It hurts too much.” After the band have unravelled their malaise, though, Jin hints there still could be light at the end of the tunnel, even if it feels miles away: “If, in a far-flung future, I’m able to smile / I’ll tell you that I did.”
‘Skit’ – their first non-musical track since 2017 – perhaps best embodies the notion of enjoying the few moments of positivity 2020 has offered us. Here the band talk through their reactions to finding out that recent single ‘Dynamite’ (which rounds things off the album) scored them their first Number One on the Billboard Hot 100; the news landed Jungkook’s birthday. “This is the best gift in my life,” he tells his bandmates. “Don’t you think this is what happiness is like?” RM asks as their chatter fades out. Personal success colliding with universal turmoil comes with its own complex set of emotions – a clash of happiness and guilt – but BTS’ casual conversation is a reminder to celebrate what you can.
What do you do after you’ve made world history by becoming the first Korean band — and only the third band ever — to hit the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100?
If you’re BTS, apparently you keep on working. On Friday, the much-adored K-pop group released Be, their first album since February’s Map of the Soul: 7 dropped at the beginning of the pandemic, and since its summer bop “Dynamite” became their first top-charting single in the US.
The song keeps on breaking ground for the band — it‘s now delivered BTS a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo or Group Performance, just days after Be’s release.
“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. It was in many ways a major departure from their typical approach to their craft.
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.
Be is a short album, with just seven new tracks alongside “Dynamite.” But nearly all of them are sublime. Taken as a whole, they form a seamless litany of bops intended to commemorate and celebrate getting through the Covid-19 pandemic. 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.
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. And that’s fine, because the album’s message seems to be about staying light, upbeat, and grasping hope wherever possible. 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.
Be opens with the band’s newest single, “Life Goes On,” which dropped at midnight on Friday alongside the album itself. 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. He’s intercut with shots of Jungkook glancing wistfully outside his window, as they both reminisce about how “one day the world stopped.”
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. 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.
“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 adorable, and I love it. 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. This is pop music as meditation, as solace, as an expression of faith.
The band’s thematic material will be familiar to fans. Here as always, BTS frankly discuss things like mental health and the pressure that goes along with fame. But Be stays airy, even when its lyrics are moody. 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. 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. After all, even though the boys say, “I am singing by myself,” they’re still all singing together.
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. Taekook’s breathy opening verse, followed by Suga and J-Hope’s laidback rhymes, all feel like someone whispering at you across your pillow. (Hiss Noise, who produced Taehyung’s two lovely solo ballads, “Winter Bear” and “Sweet Night,” also co-wrote “Blue & Grey,” and the same soothing ambiance is immediately recognizable.) Then there’s Jimin’s plaintive, cheery tenor, which always turns him into the cuddliest, secret-keeping member of your slumber party. BTS are pros at creating this kind of intimacy between artist and listenerer — and here, applying that skill to the creation of what I hereby christen “comfort pop” feels like a public service.
That brings me to “Telepathy” and “Stay,” both tracks that deal with the band missing their fans by converting their loneliness into peppy optimism. The flamboyantly autotuned “Telepathy,” the only song that comes close to being a dud for me, still feels like a musical thumbs-up and a change of pace, reminiscent of a quirkier K-pop band like Block B rather than BTS. “Stay,” on the other hand, is exactly my jam: a multi-layered song that starts out channeling the retro ’90s vibe of BTS’s earlier 2020 song “Moon” — my favorite song of the year — before opening up into a breezy EDM beat.
In discussing the specific sound of “Moon” recently with Switched on Pop’s Charlie Harding, I realized that both it and “Stay” are channeling a specific flavor of early-90s pop that gives me an instant serotonin boost. You’re lucky I even stopped looping “Stay” to listen to the rest of this album.
In both “Telepathy” and “Stay,” BTS does that thing they frequently do where the band directly addresses its fandom as a specific “you.” Ordinarily, I find this trait to be off-putting rather than sweet, even though it’s just the kind of personalization Army adores. And even though I love “Stay,” I’m definitely not sure if we needed two different songs about this theme in an album that’s already shorter than usual.
But it’s also undeniable that in this period of quarantine, social distancing, and separation, you can never have too many sonic hugs. Be’s songs are all explicit distractions, meant to acknowledge our collective humanitarian angst and then redirect it toward something happier. Even the title of the most explicitly grim song, “Dis-Ease,” ostensibly about Covid-19 itself, is a pun on the idea of unease rather than a direct confrontation of illness. Its anxiety gets channeled through a fabulous spin cycle of musical motifs, a hip-hop beat set to funk horn and guitars with an old-school boy band chorus. It’s all backing snarky raps full of humor and wordplay, and it becomes about facing — and overcoming — a more generalized internal doubt.
It’s as if the pandemic has scaled back the emotional bandwidth of this album. Bitterness, frustration, and despair may be present, but they have no place in the hallowed space of contemplation that BTS has carved out for themselves.
In this context, “Dynamite,” which I had my reservations about, feels like the perfect exclamation point when it closes out Be — a fun, vibrant future fantasy whose lyrical nonsense becomes part of the album’s determinedly escapist milieu.
Be doesn’t feel like a permanent shift away from the band’s varied framework so much as, perhaps, a timely thesis statement. Be tells us, clearly and delightfully, what BTS is and what it wants to be. And what the band wants to be is a source of positivity, hope, and gladness.
Just as ‘BE’ cycles through the various ever-changing moods the pandemic has made a constant in our lives, it’s also finds the band constantly moving between genres, each attempt a triumph. Jin, Jungkook and RM’s ‘Stay’ takes the form of steadily climbing future house, its chorus a juddering but melodic lightning bolt of joy.
“You’re doing OK, right?/You’re not in pain anywhere, right?” asks Suga on the latter. “For me lately, I’m not too sure / I feel like I’m just floating.” They’re simple words intended to help fans through uncertain days with care and sensitivity. When NME spoke to the world-conquering band in August, RM said they were “eager to comfort and give joy to people through our music and performance more than ever”. Mission accomplished.
On ‘Dis-ease’, J-hope, Suga and RM are in their element on an old school hip-hop track, serving up inventive wordplay at a mile a minute, the song conveying a message of strength: “There’s no eternal night / I’m stronger / A spark of fire / I will never fade away.” ‘Telepathy’, meanwhile, mines a different kind of disco from vibrant chart-topper ‘Dynamite’, its palette still rich and colourful, but with a more metallic sheen.