The sky cracked open; Tablo, RM let it pour with 'Stop The Rain'

Some songs try to soothe. "Stop The Rain" doesn’t bother. Instead, it pulls you under, wraps you in soaked memories, and sits there with you while the thunder rolls.

Released today, May 2, without fanfare but already echoing loudly across corners of the internet that know how to listen, Stop The Rain is not your average collab. It’s not built for charts or dance floors. It doesn’t sell a persona or lean on fan service. It’s two men — Tablo of Epik High, and RM of BTS — holding a microphone up to their trauma and refusing to clean it up before handing it over.

The track runs just over three minutes. But it doesn’t need more. This isn’t a timeline. It’s a pressure point.

Produced with an eerie restraint, the instrumental of Stop The Rain is nearly skeletal: a muffled beat, ambient pads, and just enough movement to give the lyrics air. It doesn’t rise. It doesn’t climax. It hovers — like something sitting just above collapse.

That’s the point.

From the first line, “Hello, rainy day,” there’s no illusion of a silver lining. The rain isn’t a metaphor for cleansing. It’s weight. Memory. Mental residue. What it feels like when your internal weather never clears.

Tablo opens the track with the kind of writing that stings on contact:

“I’m all in with a losing hand
Teachers called me rebel / Parents called me lost / Pastors called me devil."

No setup. No warm-up. He walks straight into the coldest parts of his youth: the isolation of being labelled, the violence masked as faith, the confusion of being told you’re “gifted” but punished for being different. “Raised by guilt, raised by shame, raised by the rod” — a chilling trifecta. It's not just autobiography. It’s indictment.

And yet, there’s no bitterness for the sake of drama. Tablo’s pain is deeply considered. His line, “What good's a bird's eye view when you're in a hunter's crossfire?” turns the idea of perspective on its head — if survival means being targeted for your difference, maybe flying high isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

By the time he confesses, “Sometimes I wished I got crushed in the womb,” you realise this isn’t poetry about pain — it’s pain as poetry.

Then RM steps in. Not to lighten the mood. Just to shift the tone from anger to exhaustion.

“The rain, the rain will fall / And tomorrow may not come
But maybe the tears will fall / To wash the pain away.”

RM doesn’t yell. He rarely does. His quiet is the kind that fills a room. He’s not fighting the storm anymore. He’s watching it pass through him — and trying to figure out how to keep standing.

The metaphor of rain in this section isn’t just a trope. It’s what depression feels like when it stops being cinematic. It’s not a downpour that ruins a moment — it’s the slow, constant drizzle that makes it hard to get out of bed.

The Chorus is an unfiltered crisis.

“Can’t run away from the pain
I feel like I’m goin’ insane
Bad thoughts fillin’ up my brain
Demons swimmin’ inside my veins.”

The chorus hits like a late-night spiral. No filter, no structure — just what it feels like to drown in your own body. RM and Tablo trade voices here, not lines. It’s not a duet. It’s a doubling down. Two perspectives, same storm.

There’s no resolution. The repetition itself becomes the message: this pain isn’t seasonal. It’s stitched in.

If Tablo looked backward, RM looks inward. His verse is confession, confrontation, and slow bleed:

“When I was a kid, I was convinced that I was destined for the 27 club.”

This isn’t melodrama. It’s honesty. A self-aware nod to a dark mythology — that of tortured genius — only to reject it mid-thought, with the image of a 29-year-old, alone in a bathtub, drinking gin, trying to feel something that isn’t fear or numbness.

“All the lost was a lust, dust into dust.”
“Nothing stops time but the clock will turn to rust.”

These are not punchlines. These are lines that punch. RM lets us in on something deeper than anxiety — the weariness of being the person everyone else leans on, when you’re not sure you’ve got anything left to give.

And then the mic drops: “Gotta turn off my phone tonight.”

Not a dramatic exit. Just the modern version of pulling the blinds shut and hoping the world forgets you exist for a few hours.

The animated video — more visual poem than music video — doubles down on the mood. Black-and-white frames show figures floating in water, rain falling endlessly, playing cards disintegrating midair, clocks without hands.

One particularly striking moment shows a body submerged, neither struggling nor dead, just suspended. It’s hard to tell if the figure is drowning or resting, and that ambiguity is the point. Stop The Rain doesn’t offer a resolution. It doesn’t need to. It’s about sitting in the moment before the decision. About not knowing if tomorrow looks better, or if it even comes.

This track didn’t come out of nowhere. Tablo has hinted that the song was recorded before RM enlisted for military service, and was delayed out of mutual respect. He’s said it felt like “pages from our journals,” and that metaphor couldn’t be more apt. This isn’t a collaboration. It’s mutual catharsis, sealed on wax.

There’s no ego here. No flex. No fireworks. Just two people trying not to break.

Why does the song matter? Well, because there’s power in saying, "Me too". Because sometimes the bravest thing a song can do is stop pretending things are okay. Because a track like Stop The Rain gives people permission to feel things they’ve been trying to outrun for years.

And because somewhere, right now, someone has their headphones on, the world shut out, and this song leaking into their bloodstream like medicine.