All seven members of BTS have announced simultaneously that they will not submit music from their comeback album Arirang for consideration at the 2027 Grammy Awards — a withdrawal that reads as a pointed rebuke of the Recording Academy’s newly created Best Asian Pop Music Performance category and the implicit segregation of Asian artists that comes with it.
RM, Jin, Suga, J-Hope, Jimin, V, and Jungkook each posted an identical statement to their individual Instagram accounts on Wednesday. “We have decided not to submit to the Grammys this year,” a translation of the message reads. “I hope that music can be heard and loved for what it is, rather than being divided by region or language. Thank you to ARMY and everyone who is always with us.”
The specific mention of both “region” and “language” is deliberate. The new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category — introduced last month as one of five new Grammy additions — requires that eligible recordings feature “meaningful use of one or more Asian languages.” BTS’s biggest song of this comeback cycle, “Swim,” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and is performed entirely in English — meaning it would have been ineligible for the new category regardless of the group’s decision. The boycott is therefore less about any specific recording and more about the principle the category represents.
What the New Category Actually Does
The Recording Academy’s full description of the award frames it as recognising “artistic excellence in Asian pop music performances,” encompassing K-pop, J-pop, and C-pop. The category sits within the Pop and Dance/Electronic Field. Eligibility requires that recordings originate from or be widely recognised within Asian markets and feature meaningful use of an Asian language — explicitly excluding recordings performed entirely in English.
Crucially, the category does not prevent Asian artists from competing elsewhere. All artists retain eligibility for the General Field categories — album of the year, record of the year, song of the year, best new artist — and the same act can appear in multiple performance categories with different recordings. The restriction is that one specific recording can only be entered in one performance category. If a song is submitted for Best Asian Pop Music Performance, it cannot also be entered for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance.
This is precisely the concern critics of the category have raised: while it does not formally block Asian artists from the General Field, it forces a choice between the new specialised category and the higher-profile mainstream ones for any individual song. For the group that spent three consecutive years nominated for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance — for “Dynamite” (2021), “Butter” (2022), and their Coldplay collaboration “My Universe” (2023) — that structural distinction is not abstract.
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The Timing and the Stakes
BTS’ decision arrives during one of the most commercially successful moments of their career. Their fifth studio album Arirang, released in March 2026 following the completion of all seven members’ mandatory South Korean military service, debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 641,000 units — the biggest opening week for a group album in over a decade. The comeback had been one of the most anticipated events in popular music this year.
The Grammy withdrawal follows a pattern established by other major artists who have declined to participate in the awards process in reaction to perceived institutional problems — Drake, The Weeknd, and Morgan Wallen among them. What makes BTS’s decision unusual is that it is framed not as a reaction to a personal snub but as a principled objection to category design.
The impact on the Grammys is real. BTS has performed on the Grammy telecast twice — a remote performance from a Seoul skyscraper in 2021 and a live spy-themed rendition of “Butter” in Las Vegas in 2022 — and both appearances were among the most-watched segments of their respective broadcasts. The group’s fanbase, known as ARMY, is among the most globally engaged and organised in the music industry, and their absence from the awards process removes one of the telecast’s most reliable international draws.
K-pop’s relationship with the Grammys reached a significant milestone earlier this year when “Golden,” from Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters, won Best Song Written for Visual Media — the first Grammy win for a K-pop song. That same song was also nominated for Song of the Year, though it did not win.
The Recording Academy has not yet issued a statement on BTS’s withdrawal.
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