Songfacts®:

• After nearly three years away, while their members did mandatory military service, BTS returned to action in 2026 with the album Arirang. The track "Hooligan" finds the septet coming out swinging. The song is a joyful, swaggering assertion of musical dominance that doubles as a manifesto for their return.
• Watch this, watch this beat goin' hooligan
  
  BTS impose their presence like hooligans, refusing to be contained or second-guessed after years away. Where "Normal" interrogates the cost of fame and "Swim" finds peace in forward motion, "Hooligan" simply plants the flag and dares anyone to move it.
• "Hooligan" was produced by El Guincho, Fakeguido, and Jasper Harris.
  
  El Guincho (Pablo Díaz Reixa) is a Spanish musician and producer based in Barcelona whose credits include some of the most sonically adventurous pop records of the 2010s and 2020s, including Rosalía's El Mal Querer and Motomami, and Charli XCX's Crash.
  
  Fakeguido (Pablo Martínez Alborch) is a Spanish producer and frequent El Guincho collaborator, co-credited on several of his most experimental productions.
  
  Jasper Harris is an American producer and songwriter whose credits include Jack Harlow's "First Class" and Tate McRae's "Greedy."
• The beat sounds like it was assembled from a particularly imaginative toolbox: eerie laughter, clashing blades, the rhythmic suggestion of knives being sharpened, cinematic string fragments, and a bassline large enough to have its own postcode. Producer MarcLo (Marcus Lomax) posted on Instagram at release: "This beat going soooooo Hooligan - it got me spinning out right now" - a reaction that doubles as a fairly accurate critical review.
• Sequenced second - between opener "Body To Body" and "Aliens" - "Hooligan" anchors Arirang's opening run as its most viscerally aggressive moment. The cultural friction between Latin avant-garde production and K-pop is entirely the point, and the strange synergy it produces is real. It is also, in the context of an album built around identity and homecoming, a reminder that BTS' roots are in hip-hop confrontation, a genre that has always known how to announce itself.
• Directed by Bao M. Nguyen, the song's music video moves through a sequence of distinct urban settings, each environment darker and more claustrophobic than the last, reinforcing the song's atmosphere of controlled menace.
  
  Nguyen is an acclaimed Vietnamese-American documentary director best known for Be Water (his 2020 ESPN 30 for 30 film about Bruce Lee) and BTS: The Return, the Netflix documentary chronicling the band's military service period and comeback.
• Jung Kook told Rolling Stone he came up with the flow immediately for "Hooligan" after hearing the beat and instantly got to work crafting the hook. When his bandmates voted to include the song on Arirang, it "felt awesome... that rocked."