RM

Kim Nam-joon was born on September 12, 1994, in Dongjak-gu, Seoul, South Korea, and moved with his family to Ilsan-gu, Gyeonggi-do, when he was around four or five years old. He grew up as the elder of two siblings with a younger sister, and as a child he largely picked up English by watching the sitcom Friends with his mother. As a student, he had a literary streak — he wrote poetry and won several awards for it, even sharing his work on an online poetry platform for about a year, which made him briefly consider a literary career before turning toward music instead.

His path into hip-hop started in his early teens, when he became active in the Korean underground rap scene under the name Runch Randa. In 2009, he auditioned for Big Deal Records and passed the first round, but didn’t make it through the second after forgetting his lyrics. That audition still changed his life — rapper Sleepy met him there and later recommended him to Big Hit Entertainment producer Pdogg. In 2010, Sleepy reached back out and encouraged him to audition directly for Big Hit CEO Bang Si-hyuk, who offered 16-year-old Namjoon a spot at the label — a decision he accepted on the spot, without even telling his parents first.

What followed was three years of grueling trainee life. RM trained alongside future bandmates Min Yoon-gi (Suga) and Jung Ho-seok (J-Hope), all while picking up real songwriting credits early — he even helped write for girl group Glam, including their debut single “Party (XXO),” a pro-LGBTQ song that Billboard later praised as one of the most progressive tracks to come out of K-pop at the time.

BTS officially debuted on June 13, 2013, with RM going by the stage name Rap Monster. His first true solo moment came almost immediately — he performed the intro track for BTS’s debut EP O!RUL8,2? as a standalone trailer ahead of the EP’s release. As the group’s primary lyricist, he went on to write or co-write a huge share of BTS’s catalog, from early hip-hop intros to globally massive title tracks.

In 2017, he made the name change official — at the time, he explained that “RM” stood for “Real Me,” a name meant to reflect a more authentic, mature stage of his artistry.

His solo journey runs parallel to his BTS work. He dropped his free mixtape RM in 2015, then mono. in 2018, which made him the highest-charting Korean solo artist on the Billboard 200 at the time, a record he held until Suga’s mixtape topped it in 2020. He made his official solo debut with the studio album Indigo on December 2, 2022, which featured guests like Erykah Badu and Anderson .Paak and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 — making him, once again, the highest-charting Korean solo act in chart history at that point.

RM enlisted for mandatory military service on December 11, 2023, alongside V, and was discharged on June 10, 2025. While serving, he still managed to release new music — his second studio album, Right Place, Wrong Person, dropped on May 24, 2024. Since his discharge, RM reunited with the other six members in Los Angeles to write and record ARIRANG, BTS’s first full-group studio album since 2020, released March 20, 2026, kicking off a massive world tour.

Outside music, RM has built a reputation as a quiet, dedicated patron of the arts and culture. In 2018, he received the fifth-class Hwagwan Order of Cultural Merit from the President of South Korea, alongside the rest of BTS, for contributions to Korean culture, and in December 2020 he was named one of the Arts Council of Korea’s ten Patrons of the Arts after donating 100 million won to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art for rare art-book distribution to rural schools and libraries. In July 2021, he and the rest of BTS were appointed Special Presidential Envoys for Future Generations and Culture, and on June 1, 2023, RM took on the role of Public Relations Ambassador for South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense Agency for KIA Recovery and Identification.