Arirang Review

The title is the Korean folk song, the one about parting and the road over the hill, and BigHit said plainly that it was chosen to mark where the group began. Body to Body opens the album on a sample of that ballad, which sets the terms: a record about separation and return, made by seven people who spent from December 2022 to June 2025 in mandatory military service.

Recorded between July and November 2025, it runs a lean forty one minutes, shorter than any of the sprawling albums that preceded the hiatus. Swim is the title track, Hooligan and Normal carried the later promotion, and the producer list, Pdogg alongside Diplo, Kevin Parker, Ryan Tedder, Flume and JPEGMafia, is wider than anything the group had tried before. The writing stays in the register of homecoming and burnout rather than reaching for anything sharper, which is the one place the record settles for less than it could have.

The numbers were never in doubt. It opened with 641,000 units, the biggest week any group has posted since 2014, including 208,000 on vinyl, and held number one for three weeks. Reviews were kinder than comeback records usually get, NPR calling it a triumphant homecoming, and the critical average settled in the low eighties.