BTS drops ‘Hooligan’ MV
BTS released the music video for “Hooligan” on April 7 and then played a sold‑out concert on April 9 where RM was widely described as performing like a “rockstar,” with ATEEZ’s Jongho seen supporting and TXT members in attendance. (x.com) (x.com)
BTS went from dropping a new “Hooligan” video on April 7 to opening the Goyang leg of the ARIRANG world tour on April 9, which is the kind of two-day sprint pop groups usually save for comeback week. BigHit Music lists Goyang Stadium shows on April 9, April 11, and April 12, with the first night also sold as an online livestream through Weverse. (billboard.com) (ibighit.com) (weverse.io) “Hooligan” is not the title track of ARIRANG. It is a B-side from the album BTS released on March 20, and the group’s official fan-chant guide shows how central it already is to the live set, with “Hooligan” listed among the songs fans were told to prepare for before the tour stop. (rollingstone.com) (weverse.io 1) (weverse.io 2) That helps explain why the video landed now. Billboard described “Hooligan” as the third visual in the ARIRANG era, which means BTS is treating the album less like one single and more like a whole season with multiple chapters. (billboard.com) The contrast inside that season is sharp. “Swim” opened as the clean, chart-leading front door, while Soompi described “Hooligan” as a rebellious, high-energy track co-written by RM, J-Hope, and Suga that shows a rougher side of the group. (billboard.com) (soompi.com) ARIRANG is moving at blockbuster scale. Billboard reported that the album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 with 641,000 equivalent album units, including 532,000 pure sales, and “Swim” debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100 while 13 songs from the album entered the chart at once. (billboard.com 1) (billboard.com 2) So when BTS used the Goyang opener to lean hard into “Hooligan” energy, fans were not reacting to a random deep cut. They were reacting to a song that had already been pushed by an official video, a fan-chant guide, and an album campaign big enough to put more than a dozen tracks onto the main United States singles chart in one week. (billboard.com) (weverse.io) (billboard.com) The Goyang shows are also the launch pad for a tour that is built like a stadium campaign from the start, not a cautious reunion. BigHit Music’s schedule runs from Goyang to Tokyo, Tampa, Mexico City, Stanford, Las Vegas, Madrid, London, Paris, East Rutherford, Chicago, and Los Angeles across April through September 2026. (ibighit.com) That is why the April 9 concert drew so much attention beyond the setlist itself. A home-country stadium opener, three weeks after the first full studio album of new material since 2020, was always going to function like a proof-of-scale test for the rest of the tour. (rollingstone.com) (ibighit.com) And the “rockstar” talk around RM fits the way this comeback has been framed from the beginning. Rolling Stone said ARIRANG pushes BTS into more adventurous territory, and “Hooligan” is the clearest example so far of the group choosing edge and volume over polish and nostalgia. (rollingstone.com) (soompi.com) What happened this week, then, was not just “new video, then concert.” BTS used April 7 and April 9 to turn one B-side into a live-event centerpiece, and they did it while launching a stadium tour behind the biggest album week any group has posted on the Billboard 200 in the modern units era. (billboard.com 1) (billboard.com 2)
