Seven years is a long time to wait. BTS know that better than anyone – and from the sounds of their newly released conversation with Josh "Bru" Brubaker on Audacy Check In, they're under no illusions about what their return needed to be.

Sitting down to talk through ARIRANG, their first full-length album in nearly seven years, the group were candid about the logic behind coming back at full scale. "We haven't had a tour in 6.5 years, so fans have been waiting for a long time," RM said. "We felt like we had to come back with a big project with fresh, new songs. That kind of comeback is really natural."

SUGA explained that the group worked with an entirely new roster of collaborators – Mike Will Made It, Diplo, Tame Impala, Artemas among them – a departure from the tight-knit production circle they'd built their sound around. "Since we were used to working on the songs ourselves with our previous producers, it was a bit unfamiliar in the beginning," he admitted, "but a lot of the producers were enthusiastic about participating and we had a lot of discussions throughout the process." The result, he said, speaks for itself.

The solo years – scattered across different sounds, different timelines, different versions of themselves – only sharpened the pull back toward the group. Jungkook put it plainly: "We couldn't be there to witness each other growing through all those experiences and time. So, I was very much looking forward to this song session and then this project."

What's threaded through ARIRANG, and what RM returned to more than once, is identity. The album's title reaches back into Korean traditional music, and that rootedness is intentional. "We are rooted in Korea," RM said, "but still, we want to make it clear… we're all born in Korea, started everything in Korea… we wanted our new album and sound from now on to be universal and eternal like a Korean traditional song." 

On legacy, RM was characteristically direct: "When you have some sort of specific intention, when you make something, especially music, it always fails. We've been vacant for years – to see [our fans'] eyes and energy, I felt like that was everything we need as a maker for our content. We just want to have a good time with the [BTS] Army and the people that listen to us."

Elsewhere, J-Hope offered a disarmingly personal take on how fashion has grown into something inseparable from the BTS project. "When I first came to Seoul, I used to look at SUGA's fashion and was like, 'oh, I want to wear this, I want to follow that,'" he said. "Now it just goes shoulder to shoulder – fashion inspires our music and I definitely think fashion is a way to express our music in a better way."