“I missed them so much,” says Stephanie Prado, a die-hard BTS fan who has been desperately waiting for the group to reunite after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus.

Her love for the boy band inspired her to move from Brazil to South Korea—so it was no surprise that she turned up last Friday for “BTS Festa,” a big party held every year near Seoul on the group’s anniversary.

The time she has spent waiting has moved “both slowly and quickly”, Stephanie says, waving an ARMY bomb, the official lightstick used by BTS fans, who call themselves the ARMY.

Behind her is a huge sculpture of the lightstick, a must-have in the K-pop world.

This year’s event is special because a reunion is finally around the corner. The countdown peaked last week, when four of the seven members, RM, V, Jimin, and Jung Kook, completed their military service. And the wait ends on Saturday when the last of them, Suga, is discharged.

“I hope they rest now,” Stephanie says, before adding, “but of course I also want albums, concerts, everything”.

The 18 months in the military that are mandatory for all South Korean men forced the world’s most successful boy band in recent years to hit pause in 2022. Now they are returning, some say, to a K-pop industry that is quite different from the one they knew: faced with stalled album sales, shaken by scandals, and increasingly scrutinised over the excessive pressure it puts on stars.

The absence of a leading band, industry watchers say, was deeply felt.

“Without BTS, a core pillar was missing,” says Kim Young-dae, music critic and author of BTS: The Review.

“There have been concerns recently that K-pop is losing momentum. True or not, BTS could change that perception.”

There are no plans yet for all seven members to appear together, but that didn’t stop the ARMY from gathering early on a humid morning in Goyang.

The long, restless queue stretched to the subway station an hour before the gates for the BTS Festa opened. The snippets of English, Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish alongside Korean threw off a local walking past who asked, “Why are there so many foreigners here?”

The shift in K-pop

Still, the industry beyond the ARMY can pose a challenge.

While BTS was on a break, the other K-pop sensation, Blackpink, has not dropped an album since September 2022, opting instead for solo releases. These were the leaders of K-pop’s third generation.

But they have been succeeded by fourth and fifth generations that have brought a fresh style to the genre. The newer acts, which debuted after 2018, lack a standout name like BTS because K-pop has become more diverse than ever. The result is a range of very popular and experimental groups.