Last October, South Korea’s biggest boyband, BTS, revealed they were going on “hiatus”. As a band who have seldom adhered to the norms of western pop, they delivered the news in suitably intriguing style. It was announced during the annual YouTube broadcast of BTS having dinner together, during which they had tucked into a couple of bottles of whisky and were visibly quite pissed. They were openly critical of K-pop’s notoriously controlling system of battery-farming pop stars – “they don’t give you time to mature, you have to keep producing music and keep doing something … there’s no time left for growth” protested the band’s de-facto leader, RM – and freely admitted they were out of ideas. “What message do we want to give?” complained rapper Suga. “Nothing comes out any more.”
