Permission to Dance

The song

‘Permission to Dance’ is the digital single BTS released in July 2021. The music video went up on the official channel on 9 July, and this release — the song, an R&B remix and an instrumental — is dated 23 July. The credits in the album introduction on Bugs say Steve Mac, Stephen Kirk and Jenna Andrews produced it, with Ed Sheeran and Johnny McDaid among the writers, and that Ed Sheeran played bass, John Parricelli guitar and Dave Arch arranged the strings. It is the group’s third English-language song, after Dynamite and Butter.

Reviews

IZM’s Im Sun-hee read the song, in a single review dated July 2021, as choosing a different direction from the two before it. She wrote that “the reunion with Ed Sheeran, whose hand they had already taken once on ‘Make it right’, was possible because it went forward on an accurate understanding of the group”, and that “he knows which ingredients make their own colours shine when added, and he has captured the ‘lively but somehow lyrical’ mood that had not been seen for a while”. She wrote that “where the two earlier English songs stressed a cheer that makes you forget the hardship in front of you, this one delivers warmth as quiet healing”, and set out the device: “To take that as far as it will go it reaches for gospel, first cutting the rap parts boldly so that the song flows softly, and offering warmth through the electric piano and strings placed here and there.” She added that “the notes that step downward in the chorus instead of bursting, and the group chorus in the later stretch, are gospel to the letter”.

Idology’s (아이돌로지) Yemi wrote in the outlet’s page on July 2021 singles that “‘Permission to Dance’ is the song that, following ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Butter’, secured BTS’s standing in the United States”. She wrote that “a cheerful, familiar melody carrying the colours of the British pop singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, with strings and a rock sound added, called to mind One Direction, counted among the top boy bands of the previous era”, and that “the music video, which dresses the lyric of dancing as much as you like in hope for the future, cannot help recalling a pandemic that keeps not ending”.

NME’s Rhian Daly reviewed the track on 9 July, the day the music video appeared, and gave it four stars out of five. She wrote that “‘Permission To Dance’ is classic, uplifting pop”, and that “there are warm piano notes and string motifs that twirl and spin as if they’re suggesting the dance moves you should pull”. Of the closing stretch she wrote that “towards the end, there’s a moment where the reverb gets turned all the way up, the instrumentation all but fades away and all that remains are BTS’ voices and rousing handclaps”.

What came with it

Besides the song and its instrumental, the release carries an R&B remix, which the credits say was remixed by Hiss noise. NME’s Daly read the song as “an ode to the liberating, healing power of music” and noted that it is BTS’s third English-language song and their second collaboration with Ed Sheeran, after 2019’s ‘Make It Right’. IZM’s Im wrote of a song with its sharper edges taken out that “it has the finest touch of the three, the one that moves the heart most”.

Numbers

The label’s own distribution metadata carries the song twice — as a standalone single dated 9 July and as a single reissued with the R&B remix on 23 July. A mini album dated 9 July, holding this song together with Butter, sits in the same place.

What came after

BTS gathered nine years into the anthology album Proof in June 2022. Before this song came Butter, two months earlier, and before that the mini album BE.