Songfacts®:

• "Like Animals," a track from BTS' 10th album, Arirang, finds the septet loosening the tie, dimming the lights, and seeing what happens when the carefully managed pop phenomenon gives way to something a bit more feral.
• The song is an alternative rock track about longing, the sort of emotional slow-burn that suggests two people have reached that delicate stage where conversation is no longer sufficient and something more instinctive is about to take over. It feels like the cousin of "Fake Love," if that song ditched the choreography and decided to follow its impulses rather than interrogate them. Where "Fake Love" wrestled with illusion and self-protection, "Like Animals" simply shrugs and says: perhaps we stop pretending altogether.
• The "animals" metaphor does a fair bit of heavy lifting. Yes, it gestures toward raw romantic desire, but it also ties neatly into a broader Arirang theme: that beneath the stadium-sized precision of BTS (see also the immaculate sheen of "Dynamite") there's always been something more unruly. "Like Animals" just lets that instinct take the wheel for a while.
• "Like Animals" was produced by Diplo, Artemas, Daintree, and Kevin White.
  
  Diplo, whose credits include MIA's "Paper Planes" and Justin Bieber's "What Do You Mean?," brings his signature genre-fluid restlessness to the track.
  
  Artemas, the British singer-producer known for his crossover hit "I Like the Way You Kiss Me," arrives here with his regular creative unit intact: Toby Daintree, his longtime production partner since their breakthrough collaboration "If U Think I'm Pretty," and Kevin White (one half of production duo Rice N' Peas), together forming a tightly knit team whose chemistry across Artemas's own catalog gives "Like Animals" its alt-rock edge.
• Diplo, Artemas, Daintree, Jesse Fink, Kevin White, RM, Kirsten Spencer, and Beau Nox wrote the song. RM is the sole BTS member in the writing credits; he contributed to every track on the album except the interlude. Jesse Fink, who co-wrote "I Like the Way You Kiss Me" and has worked with Artemas across multiple projects, is also in the writing credits.
• Sequenced at track 10, "Like Animals" arrives in the album's nocturnal final stretch; a suite of more seductive songs that follows the emotional reckoning of "Normal." It is one of the more surprising entries in BTS' catalog: a band who built their reputation on emotional openness here channeling something more instinctive and less easily articulated.