It’s been a long journey, but BTS is finally back. And in the new Netflix documentary BTS: The Return, premiering Friday (March 27), the K-pop superstars are giving fans an intimate look inside the creation of ARIRANG, the group’s first album in almost four years.

While shooting, director Bao Nguyen was thinking a lot about “the mythology of someone who leaves,” he tells Billboard, suggesting that the band’s massive comeback shares much in common with the story of Odysseus returning home to Penelope. Quite the lofty comparison, though the actual film takes a much more grounded view of the world’s biggest boy band as they establish their “2.0” era. In it, the album’s studio sessions — held over two months in Los Angeles, then continued in Seoul — are captured with surprising transparency, offering an unmediated glimpse at the artistic process as BTS battle exhaustion, creative slumps and disagreements with each other and their label alike.

“I feel like everything about us has changed, at least a little bit,” V says at one point. And while there may be truth to that statement — especially with the members completing mandatory service in South Korea’s military and putting out solo work in the intervening time — through its insightful car chats and grainy camcorder POVs, the documentary serves as a straightforward reminder of why exactly the world fell in love with these seven guys in the first place.

From ongoing struggles with fame to the many difficult conversations that went into the making of ARIRANG, here are seven key takeaways from BTS: The Return.