South Korea saturated North Korean airwaves on Sunday by blasting boy band BTS’s chart-topping hits in retaliation for Pyongyang sending over white balloons carrying plastic bags of trash and excrement last month.

A South Korean loudspeaker near the border played Voice of Freedom, a two-hour radio program run by the South Korean military’s psychological warfare unit, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

The audio assault started with the South Korean national anthem and then segued to a news report about how the United States, Japan, and South Korea condemned North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s cozy relationship with Russia and its recent missile tests. There was also a reference to South Korea’s Samsung Electronics being a global brand, and the broadcast ended with K-pop, short for Korean pop music. 

One of BTS’s songs picked for the occasion was “Dynamite,” a 2020 release that has close to 2 billion views on YouTube.

K-pop is a sore spot for Kim, who has tried to cut off access to the outside world. The North Korean leader declared a “semi-war state” and directed the country to fire artillery shells near the border in 2015 after several songs by the girl K-pop group Girls’ Generation were blasted at his country. 

In the three years that followed, ties between the two Koreas softened, and one of the Girls’ Generation members even sang a North Korean song during a summit between the two countries. In 2018, the North and South reached a military agreement that included South Korea taking down 40 loudspeakers. Since then, tensions are back on high. 

In fact, North Korea and South Korea are technically at war, though neither side has indicated they are in a hurry to start actual fighting. 

What’s developed instead is a bizarre back-and-forth between the two nations. 

In May, more than 1,000 white balloons carrying plastic bags of North Korean trash and excrement were flown into South Korea as a form of dirty protest. The air deliveries triggered emergency warnings to border town residents about “suspicious objects” floating in the sky. It was payback after a South Korean activist group sent 300,000 anti-regime leaflets and thousands of USB drives containing K-pop music over the border. 

Within hours of Sunday’s border broadcast, Kim Yo Jong, the North Korean leader’s powerful sister, warned of a “new counteraction” and called South Korea’s latest actions “a prelude to a very dangerous situation.” 

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South Korea’s military said on Monday that it detected signs that North Korea is installing its own loudspeakers along the heavily armed border.