K-Pop Band BTS Releases New Album Featuring Halsey And Ed Sheeran

BTS, the K-pop supergroup with millions of fans across the world, dropped their new album, Map Of The Soul: Persona. In what can be interpreted as their growing mainstream relevance in the United States, the album features pop heavyweights like Halsey and Ed Sheeran.

“We find strength and happiness in every moment,” the group said in a statement published by Pitchfork. “You’ve given us so much love, and now we want to get to know our fans more. We filled our album with our genuine feelings and the messages that we want to share with you.”

This highly anticipated album was welcomed with open arms by BTS fans collectively known as “Army.” Their appreciation for Persona caused multiple hashtags related to the group to trend on Twitter on Friday morning, and the excitement in their tweets was palpable.

“Eye [sic] still can’t believe this day is real like BTS really dropped a whole album and an mv and they outsold themselves once again…” one fan wrote.

The release of Persona follows the stratospheric success of their previous albums Love Yourself: Tear and Love Yourself: Answer. Both albums topped the Billboard 200 chart.

It looks like this new album seems on track to replicate that success. Their song with Halsey called “Boy With Luv” currently has 22 million views on Youtube.

Soompi reports that the video has already broken records. According to their article, the video got 10 million views in less than three hours. This means that they’ve surpassed the record set by BLACKPINK’s “Kill This Love,” which received 10 million views for its video in 4 hours and 13 minutes.

As Elite Daily notes the song is about finding happiness and sounds like an ode from the group to their fans. It also appears to be a follow-up to a song they released in 2014 called “Boy In Luv,” per Buzzfeed News.

According to Buzzfeed, Halsey went to South Korea to collaborate with BTS on the track, and the video references the classic movie musical Singing In The Rain. The song also features two rap verses from Suga and Rap Monster.

The album has seven songs and as mentioned earlier, there’s a song on it featuring Ed Sheeran called “Make It Right,” which was produced by Suga. As Buzzfeed notes, Suga hinted that the song was coming back in December.

BTS is set to be the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on April 13, and they will be going on tour in May.