BTS's Jin's Astronaut turns 4: Why the song was a wound, a bandage and a homecoming

In October 2022, and it was Busan. BTS was performing their old favourites and the new ones. The best was yet to come, they said.

The atmosphere was ringing with fan chants, laughter, inside jokes and yet, somehow, unshed tears. ARMY feeds caught the smiles beneath the bursts of confetti and the promises, repeated a little too often, to return soon. Something was being said without being said, and no one could quite put it into words.

Barely two days later, the band announced they would be enlisting for military service, with Jin going first. The first reaction was a strange mix of relief and pride: The boys were no longer waiting on an exemption; they had made the decision themselves. The jokes and memes came quickly. Would V sneak in his three-piece suits? How would anyone keep Jungkook and Jimin apart?

The weight of it hadn’t sunk in yet. When it finally did, it came with Jin’s Astronaut.

The song released at the end of the October, with an accompanying music video. The video was straightforward and yet filled with symbolism for those who looked hard enough: Jin, as an ‘alien’ finding his way home.

Musically, Astronaut begins softly, with a bare acoustic guitar, then rises on slow-building synths until it seems to leave the ground. Coldplay co-wrote the song with Jin and played on it, following BTS and Coldplay’s My Universe, and Kygo produced it. Chris Martin later said the song took shape after he and Jin talked about Jin’s leaving and everything he would miss.

The song was filled with a ringing farewell emotion that is unique to Jin: It was a wound and yet, it was also the bandage. The chorus, When I’m with you, there is no one else. I get heaven to myself…’ It became the dedication to ARMY, and it also began to feature in multiple edits of videos with Jin: Jin, the eldest ‘hyung’ and his individual relationship with each of the six. Timelines overflowed with those edits.

Maybe it is difficult to not associate the song with a stream of images and clips of the brotherhood that had grown since 2013. And then, Jungkook's glassy eyes at Jin's military service drove the knife right in.

On the very day of its release, Jin sang Astronaut in Buenos Aires beside Coldplay’s Chris Martin, a stadium of lights rising around him. It would be his last performance before he enlisted that December. Through 2023, the song became ARMY’s anthem, something to hold on to in the Jin-shaped space BTS left behind. Then, one by one, the others followed, and by the end of the year the stage stood quiet.

Yet, Jin clearly didn’t intend Astronaut to be a maudlin goodbye. It’s also the promise of return and hope. When he returned in June 2024, he held an ARMY-hugging event, mini-concert, where he sang Astronaut.

The feeling rushed back all at once: the Astronaut was home.

Four years on, the timelines are full of a tangible reverence. Astronaut still marks the moment the military service era began, the night the stars first felt far away. But it also holds the memory of how Jin kept reaching across the distance, ensures ARMY could watch videos month after month, so that even his absence never quite felt empty. And then, one June morning, the signal grew stronger, and he was home. Another June would follow, where the other six would be home too.