RM
RM is the leader of BTS. After the 2018 mixtape mono. he released his first official solo album, Indigo, in 2022 and Right Place, Wrong Person in 2024, and in 2026 he took part throughout the lyric-writing of 'SWIM', the title track of the group's fifth album.
RM is the leader of BTS, which debuted with all seven members on 13 June 2013. The official site gives his birthday as 12 September 1994.
The records under his own name begin with a mixtape. Four years after the seven-track mono. came out on 23 October 2018, the label’s notes for Indigo called it “a mixtape released in October 2018”. Billboard placed it sixth in its list of the 20 best K-pop albums of 2018 on 17 December, and wrote that RM had reached the highest Billboard 200 position for a Korean solo artist without any particular promotion. The British duo HONNE produced the second track, ‘seoul (prod. HONNE)’.
His first official solo album, Indigo, came out on 2 December 2022 with ten tracks. The album notes carried on Bugs say RM led the whole of the work, from the lyrics and music of every song to the album’s concept, design, running order and music-video planning, and that the title comes from indigo, the basic colour of denim, worked through the album against the black and white of mono. The cover carries a work by the late painter Yun Hyong-keun, and the title track ‘Wild Flower’ features youjeen of Cherry Filter. Idology put the album on its list of the 20 albums of 2022, and IZM put it among its ten Korean albums of 2023 the following year.
The second solo album, Right Place, Wrong Person, came out on 24 May 2024 with eleven tracks. The album notes say it deals with moments that feel like being “a stranger who does not fit the place”, and that it began from the question of what it would have been like to be Kim Nam-joon, an ordinary young man, rather than a member of BTS. According to the same notes, San Yawn, creative director of Balming Tiger, produced it; RM formed a project team around him called TEAM RM, worked with it from the planning stage and wrote lyrics for every track. The album’s last song, ‘Come back to me’, came out two weeks earlier, on 10 May.
His writing credits run through the group’s records too. According to BIGHIT MUSIC’s album notes he worked on ‘Butter’ in 2021; he is named with Suga and j-hope on ‘Yet To Come’, the title track of the 2022 anthology album Proof; and on the tenth-anniversary single ‘Take Two’, which Suga produced, he wrote with j-hope. Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that he took part throughout the lyric-writing of ‘SWIM’, the title track of the 2026 fifth album ARIRANG, and his name is in the credits of NORMAL, which reissued a song from that album, alongside j-hope and Suga.
In the Q&A Billboard Korea carried on the day ARIRANG was released, he answered that half of “BTS 2.0”, the name the members gave this era, was the seven of them being together again, and the other half was that they had to move somewhere and change. On the album’s Korean elements, he told iMBC Entertainment that rather than carrying them over as a fixed form, the group wanted to work them out naturally in its own way. When the world tour opened in Goyang on 9 April that year he told The Korea Times that “the preparation wasn’t easy with a 360-degree stage, but once we get going I think it’s going to be a lot of fun”.
His military service began in December 2023 and ended on 10 June 2025; Hankook Ilbo reported that he was discharged alongside V.
The solo work runs mono., Indigo, Right Place, Wrong Person, in that order. The label introduced Indigo as his first personal work in about four years after mono., and Right Place, Wrong Person as his first personal album in a year and five months after Indigo. How each member explained “BTS 2.0” is in the story on the release-day Q&A for ARIRANG, and the group’s 13 years are on the BTS hub.
RM's collection show 'RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me' opens at SFMOMA
The exhibition of RM's personal collection, curated with two SFMOMA co-curators, runs to 7 February 2027.
Feature · Read the storyARIRANG world tour opening
RM said that "the preparation wasn't easy with a 360-degree stage, but once we get going I think it's going to be a lot of fun".
koreatimes.co.kr · Source 1Discharged alongside V
RM was discharged alongside V. Hankook Ilbo recorded it as the day before Jimin and Jung Kook were discharged.
hankookilbo.com · Source 2BIGHIT MUSIC
BTS is a seven-piece group under BIGHIT MUSIC that debuted on 13 June 2013 with the single album '2 Cool 4 Skool'. Its fifth full-length album ARIRANG arrived on 20 March 2026, after all seven had completed military service, and an 85-show world tour opened in April.
BTS released their fifth full-length album ARIRANG at 1 p.m. KST on 20 March 2026 and named the promotions that followed it 'BTS 2.0'. In a Q&A carried by Billboard Korea, RM said half of it was the seven of them together again, and Suga answered "a new beginning".
'RM x SFMOMA: Between You and Me', the exhibition curated by BTS leader RM, opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on 3 October and runs to 7 February 2027. The museum says nearly 150 works from the collection RM has built over nearly 10 years hang alongside its own.
The reports behind the facts above, for the ones no story on the site covers yet. A row with a story cites its sources there; the act's own channel and a brand's official page are linked in the rows themselves.
