BTS are back, and the timing feels right. Not because the industry needed them, though it did. It’s because they needed themselves. The May 2026 issue of Rolling Stone puts that return front and center with eight separate covers – one for each of the seven members and one for the group – rolling out online over eight consecutive days through Monday, April 20. All sixteen international editions of the magazine are publishing the package simultaneously, making this one of the most coordinated cover releases in the publication’s history. For collectors, a limited-edition box set called BTS: The Cover Collection is currently available at shop.rollingstone.com for $125 with worldwide shipping. The set includes all eight physical covers of the May 2026 issue, each tucked inside a custom keepsake box designed exclusively for this release.
The album at the center of all this is ARIRANG, BTS’s first full record of new material in nearly six years. It sold 641,000 copies in the United States in its first week, landing at number one on Apple Music in 115 countries. These kinds of numbers silence arguments. However, numbers are not really what this record is about. What makes ARIRANG worth paying attention to – and what the May 2026 issue of Rolling Stone explores at length – is something less quantifiable. This is a group that walked away from the biggest pop run of the XXI century, served their mandatory military obligations, and returned with more profound questions.
Rolling Stone’s reporting for the May 2026 issue took place in mid-February at the headquarters of Hybe, the South Korean entertainment giant that BTS built into a global empire. The building has the feel of a place that takes itself very seriously. Security guards intercept visitors with an efficiency that would impress a White House detail. Employees circulate with non-disclosure agreements on clipboards. Even the restrooms operate on a badge system to enter and exit.
When BTS is on the premises, it becomes clear why. The group’s influence on South Korea is so profound that the country amended its conscription laws – at least partly with BTS in mind – yet all seven members ultimately completed their service. Advertising billboards featuring V promote a local coffee brand along Seoul highways. The free concert that the group is preparing to perform in the city will have them enter the stage via the King’s Road, a stretch of land with five centuries of royal history behind it. No Western pop group occupies this kind of cultural space at home. Very few ever have, anywhere.
RM, the group’s leader, is the person most visibly wrestling with what BTS means and what it should mean next. He spent 18 months of mandatory military service in a state of persistent insomnia, working through the discomfort with a rotating soundtrack of Don Toliver, Playboi Carti, and Joji, as well as classical and ambient music when lyrics became overwhelming. One phrase kept returning to him from a Tyler, the Creator song: “Forever is too long.” He found something personal in those words that had nothing to do with their original meaning.
His service pushed him into what he describes as an interior cave. He emerged with more questions than answers. Five weeks before ARIRANG‘s release date, he openly admitted that he was still very lost and that the album does not offer a clear answer about who BTS is in 2026. This is not self-deprecation performed for a journalist. Since at least 2022, he has been asking aloud whether the group’s pursuit of a global reach has cost them something essential. Three back-to-back English-language singles – Dynamite, Butter, and Permission to Dance – completed their conquest of Western pop charts. However, these songs were not written in the group’s native language, and they did not reflect the sharp, aggressive hip-hop sensibility that defined BTS in the beginning.
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ARIRANG was created in Los Angeles during the summer of 2025. Most of the group lived together in a shared house and worked in four separate writing rooms for seven to eight hours a day. Producer Pdogg, who has worked with the group since before their 2013 debut single “No More Dream,” oversaw the sessions from writing through mastering, a first for him on a BTS project. According to Pdogg, the result is an album where the individual character of each member comes through more distinctly than on any previous record.
Collaborators included Diplo; Spanish producer El Guincho, who has worked with Rosalía and Charli XCX; hip-hop producer Mike WiLL Made-It; and British songwriter James Essien. The first single, “Swim,” came together during pre-production sessions before the group arrived in Los Angeles. Essien and his co-writer, Tyler Spry, developed the instrumental after another idea failed to impress Hybe’s chairman, Bang Si-Hyuk. The result was more restrained and subtle than anything BTS had released in years, exactly the point. Jungkook‘s contribution to “Hooligan,” one of the album’s sharpest tracks, came instinctively the moment he heard the beat El Guincho had constructed from sampled strings from a 1962 French film. The closing track, “Into the Sun,” was recorded almost entirely live with V on the microphone, Pdogg on the Moog bass, and two collaborators on the drums and guitar.
Fashion has always been part of how BTS communicates. On the day of the February session with Rolling Stone, RM arrived wearing a polished black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, heavy boots, and oversized, parachute-style trousers. As the original report dryly notes, this look takes a certain type of person to pull off. His hair was loosely bleached at the tips. He looked alert and slightly amused. V, the group’s baritone, approaches his image the way a collector approaches an acquisition: deliberately and with a sense of long-term value. His recent solo work has moved away from mainstream pop aesthetics and toward R&B and jazz-influenced textures. His visual choices during the ARIRANG era follow the same logic. Jin, the eldest at 33, possesses the kind of dry wit and physical ease that fashion houses in Paris and Milan spend considerable time trying to manufacture through casting.
The eight Rolling Stone covers for the May 2026 issue were shot with this range of personalities in mind. Each member gets a solo cover. Taken together, they function as a document of seven distinct presences that, somehow, also hold together as a unit. This is difficult to achieve in a single shoot, let alone across eight. The box set format, with each cover in its own custom keepsake packaging, acknowledges that these images have a different relationship with their audience than a standard magazine cover.
Years of solo activity reshaped the group without dissolving it. Jin carried the Olympic torch at the Paris Games, released two strong rock-leaning EPs, and appeared on a successful Netflix entertainment series, all while, by his own account, thinking mainly about getting back to the other six. Suga published D-DAY under his Agust D alter ego. In it, he confronts personal traumas with an unflinching directness that is rare in pop music, regardless of scale. He also completed 21 months of social service in lieu of standard military duty, due to a past shoulder injury. J-Hope headlined Lollapalooza in 2022, becoming the first South Korean artist to headline a major American festival. He released an album that questioned whether the enormous pressure of being loved by millions was worth it.
Jimin’s solo single “Like Crazy” reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 before Jung Kook’s “Seven,” making Jimin the first Korean solo artist to achieve this feat. The youngest, Jung Kook, spent his military service in the kitchen with enormous pots seven days a week. He came out of it with one overriding thought: he wanted to get back on stage. V retreated into his imagination during his service. He read Han Kang and Keigo Higashino, did heavy lifts that his unit considered modest, and generally tried to let the experience reset him.
The title comes from a traditional Korean folk song with centuries of history and a melancholy quality that resists easy translation. Bang and Hybe proposed the name, and the group accepted it almost immediately. The decision to lean back into Korean – “Please,” for example, was originally recorded in English before the group insisted on rewriting it — reflects a deliberate correction. In the years after Permission to Dance, the members felt that they had drifted from their own voice. ARIRANG is their attempt to find it again.
That said, producer Pdogg is clear that the album was not constructed as a cultural statement. The Korean identity is present in the language, the references, and the title in a natural way, not in a forced or decorative manner. The music crosses genres, and the collaborators were Western. What connects these elements is the group’s sensibility. After six years and a military interruption, it has become clearer that their sensibility is more distinct and difficult to imitate than they had anticipated.
The world tour runs through March of next year. Jin successfully pushed to extend the tour by about eight months, arguing that the group had made promises to fans around the world that a shorter itinerary would not honor. After that, the future is genuinely open. Suga has suggested releasing singles rather than full albums going forward, given how quickly the musical landscape shifts. During February rehearsals, Jimin proposed that they return to the studio immediately after the tour ends. The Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance, which was conducted entirely in Spanish before the largest American television audience of the year, has clearly lodged itself in the group’s imagination.
When asked about a potential Super Bowl appearance, RM is measured. He does not take it for granted. He acknowledges that global audiences embraced Parasite and that Korean culture has gained a foothold in the West. He believes that, over time, the conditions may change. He is not wrong to be patient. BTS has already achieved things that were deemed impossible for a group from South Korea. They know better than most how those walls come down, slowly at first and then all at once.
Photography: Pak Bae. @pakbae
Editors-in-Chief: Sean Woods & Shirley Halperin
Music Editor: Christian Hoard
Art Director: Joe Hutchinson
Director of Photography: Jenn Santana
Styling: Yejin Kim.
Hair: Hansom, Hwayeon, and Hyunwoo Lee.
Makeup: Dareum Kim and Shinae.
Set Design: Yeabyul Jeon.
Production: Nuhana.
Executive Producer: Sooh Hwang.
Producers: Sebin Park and Kaly Ngo.
Line Producer: Cherry Lee.
Digital Technician: Huijin Kim.
Photo Assistants: Soojung Oh, Minhyuk Lee, Minjun Kim, Jihyun Oh, Juwan Kang, and Junhyung Yang.
Set Design Team: Sohyun Won, Yunseon Choi, Junhyuk Sim.
RS Video Director of Photography: Mike Beech.
Camera Operators: Byeong Hwi Min, Churl Gwon, Hyunsuh Paik.
DIT: Jiwoon Lee.
Sound Engineer: Min Jae Lee.
Production Assistant: Seohyun Yoon.
Read the full BTS interview on rollingstone.fr
Click here to purchase the exclusive, limited-edition BTS collector’s box set from Rolling Stone