On a humid July evening, Kaley came home from her Louisiana high school, wolfed down her mom’s home-cooked dinner, and retreated to her room, where she sat on the bed and started texting her friends about Korean pop music. The bubbly 14-year-old is in “many” group chats about the needle-pushing global phenomenon known as K-pop, but on this day she faced a task that she relished: the chance to recruit a new fan for BTS, the wildly popular seven-member group that tethers their hip-hop swagger with ravey pop beats. When an “internet friend” asked for an introduction to the group, Kaley gave a CliffsNotes rundown of their sound, and a short description of each member. When she got to Suga, a rapper and producer with slushy-blue hair, Kaley typed, “he’s so beautiful I want to shove a hammer in my mouth.” And then, she actually did it.

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“I hope I’m not starting a trend!” Kaley said, giggling, during a light-hearted phone conversation. She managed to remove the hammer without any pain, but admitted that “it’s probably not the most relieving feeling [for BTS] to find that your fans are shoving tools in their mouth.”

Serious dedication to BTS isn’t uncommon among the group’s fans, though most of them channel their passion a bit more productively: by streaming their kaleidoscopic videos, and downloading their music. This week, for the chart week ending September 21, the band entered the U.S. album chart at number seven with their imaginative rap/pop hybrid Love Yourself: Her, thanks to a sustained campaign from the band's global online followers. As Billboard reports, it’s the highest-charting K-pop album ever — one-upping BTS’s own previous record for 2016’s Wings — and helped score the genre its biggest sales week of all time. That’s powered, in part, by streaming numbers from the mind-bending “DNA” video, in which the members defy gravity in a matrix of Inception-style rooms and contort their bodies into double helix-inspired choreography, set to a maddeningly catchy whistle hook. On the singles chart, “DNA” is new at number 85, making it only the second ever K-pop track sung predominantly in the Korean language to make the Hot 100, following PSY’s Obama-endorsed “Gangnam Style,” which galloped to number two in 2012.