Wings

With the 2016 album Wings, BTS stepped into far darker and more ambitious territory. Where they had until then sung about school, rebellion, and young love, with this era they moved from the subject of growing up to its analysis, drawing on literature, philosophy, and classical painting. At its center stood temptation, the first encounter with one's own dark side, and the realization that one cannot grow up without losing some part of one's innocence.

The album rests on the 1919 novel Demian by the German writer Hermann Hesse. That story of the boy Emil Sinclair, who, in growing up, comes to understand that the world is not only light but also dark, and that he must accept both sides in order to become whole, runs through the entire era. The foundation of the concept became the novel's famous quote, the one about the bird struggling to break out of its egg. The egg is the world, and whoever wishes to be born must destroy that world. In the short films that preceded the album's release, the members read Hesse's very words aloud.

The music video for Blood Sweat & Tears is one of the most visually layered in their career. The action unfolds in a museum filled with artworks chosen with deliberate meaning. Behind one member hangs The Fall of the Rebel Angels by the Flemish master Pieter Bruegel, painted in 1562, depicting the fall of the rebellious angels, while in the background a scene of Icarus's fall also appears, the young man who, flying too close to the sun, lost his wings of wax. This too is no accident, since the album's title, which translates to wings, points to the idea that flight carries within it the risk of falling.

The video's climax comes in the moment a member finds himself before a statue of an angel with black wings, a figure representing Abraxas, the deity from Hesse's novel who unites good and evil within himself. The kiss given to the statue marks the moment the character stops fleeing his own darkness and accepts it as part of himself. Immediately after, above a mirror, Nietzsche's words appear, that one must still have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star. A carefully composed detail follows, white lilies turning purple in their reflection, a bright background darkening, and a face in the mirror cracking, because innocence has been irretrievably lost.

In this era, each of the seven received a solo song of his own for the first time. Jungkook, in Begin, sings about how he was shaped by his fellow members, Suga composes an ode to music as his first love in First Love, V speaks of guilt in Stigma, Jimin sings of being trapped in a lie in Lie, j-hope pays tribute to his mother in MAMA, Jin, in Awake, his first attempt at songwriting, admits his fear of not being good enough, and RM, standing by a river in Reflection, repeats that he would like to love himself, foreshadowing the theme of the next era. The expanded release You Never Walk Alone also included Spring Day, a song of longing and remembrance that spent years refusing to leave the Korean charts.