LOVE YOURSELF 轉 'Tear'

The record

LOVE YOURSELF 轉 ‘Tear’ is BTS’s third full-length album, released on 18 May 2018 with eleven tracks. The title track is ‘FAKE LOVE’. BIGHIT MUSIC’s album introduction on Bugs says that where LOVE YOURSELF 承 ‘Her’ expressed the flutter of love, this record holds the pain of meeting a parting, and that the title track — a realisation that a love taken for fate was false — sets out the theme of the whole album.

Reviews

IZM took up the record in an album review dated May 2018. Kim Do-heon wrote that “the new record, which draws the parting concept it announced early on as gloom and self-destruction, expands a somewhat toned-down theme across a range of genres”, and called that expansion “a diversification that puts the standing of a global idol star actively to work as a tool of creation”. He wrote that “gathering the theme of the whole album through the mirrored structure of intro and outro is striking too”, and closed: “it is an excellent album that needs no other adjective.”

Idology (아이돌로지) carried the record in its 1st Listen for the middle of May 2018, as short pieces by three critics. Mimyo wrote that “in showing what difference a sensibility from K-pop can make in America it runs along the same line as the previous record, and reaches out to a wider public”, and closed by calling it “a fine album of urgent ambition, inside a current changing fast by its own doing”. Yu Je-sang gave the record that issue’s ‘Pick!’ and wrote that “they made this album with a global standard in mind, and the result, I would say, meets it to a fair degree”.

Two English-language outlets reviewed the record as well. Pitchfork’s Sheldon Pearce wrote that “‘Tear’ aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process”, and closed that “across Love Yourself 轉 ‘Tear’, BTS are at their best when they feel for and support one another”; the page carries a score of 7.1. Rolling Stone’s Elias Leight wrote that “they’re particularly adept when paying homage to hip-hop classics from the late Nineties and early 2000s”.

Among the tracks

‘FAKE LOVE’ is the song with a music video here, and the official channel’s upload is dated 18 May 2018, the day of release. Mimyo wrote that “the title song ‘Fake Love’ takes an approach closer to a non-genre ‘pop’ song built on hip-hop”, and read the part the guitar plays against the chord progression as closer to rock.

Mimyo picked out four B-sides together, writing that “tracks like ‘134340’, ‘Paradise’, ‘Anpanman’ and ‘So What’ do enough to hold the listener with a settled enchantment and draw them slowly into the album”. Pearce, on the placing of the rap parts, wrote that “the sequencing of the vocal routines is as carefully synchronized as the choreography in their videos”, and of ‘The Truth Untold’, produced by Steve Aoki, that the group “opt for a seamless piano serenade wherein the group’s four singers weave in and out of each stanza”. Yu Je-sang chose ‘Anpanman’ as his recommended track.

Numbers

The label’s own distribution metadata dates the record 18 May 2018. The English song titles come from the same place: ‘전하지 못한 진심’ is The Truth Untold and ‘낙원’ is Paradise.

What came after

The LOVE YOURSELF sequence runs on into its closing chapter after this record. Before it came LOVE YOURSELF 承 ‘Her’, eight months earlier, and before that the second full-length album, Wings.