After Singapore Indoor Stadium concerts, J-pop act Yoasobi want to take on National Stadium next

SINGAPORE – Hit Japanese pop duo Yoasobi played two nights at the Singapore Indoor Stadium to a full house on Feb 22 and 23, but they are already eyeing the 55,000-capacity National Stadium next door.

In an interview with The Straits Times after their two-hour show on Feb 23, composer and producer Ayase, 30, said in Japanese: “There’s a much bigger venue next door – we want to fill it up. To do so, we have to work harder and let more people know about us, and hopefully we can play there next time when we come back.”

No Japanese music act has held a solo concert at the National Stadium to date.

As it stands, the superduo are the J-pop act that has attracted the largest audience in Singapore with a solo concert, with almost 20,000 attendees over their two nights here, according to concert organiser Sozo.

Their previous concert here at the Resorts World Ballroom in January 2024 sold out the same day tickets went on sale, underscoring their popularity.

It comes as little surprise, as Yoasobi are Spotify’s most-streamed Japanese artistes outside Japan for four consecutive years.

The duo, known for creating songs inspired by short stories, became an almost instant success with their debut number Into The Night (2019), which remains one of their most popular songs.

Their Singapore Indoor Stadium gigs, part of their Cho-genjitsu (meaning “surrealism”) tour, covered some of their biggest hits. These included the bittersweet crowd favourite Haven’t (2020) and their most commercially successful song to date, viral hit Idol (2023), the first Japanese-language song to top the Billboard Global chart, excluding the United States.

Yoasobi, which celebrated their fifth anniversary at the end of 2024, said the past five years have been, like the title of their tour, surreal.

Vocalist Ikura – who is 24 and goes by Lilas Ikuta in her solo ventures – said: “In terms of sheer concentration of experience, I feel like I’ve lived 10 years in the past five.”

The singer-songwriter, who was in her late teens when the group was first formed, added: “Yoasobi have brought me to so many new places. I’ve grown a lot from that.”

Ayase said the duo’s success and popularity started sinking in for him only around the five-year mark.

“When we debuted, a lot of people listened to us and we were featured on major music shows. But, surprisingly, I didn’t feel like, ‘oh, this is a lot of pressure’. Because what was happening was so amazing that it took me a while to really process that it was happening. Initially, it felt like this was something that was happening to somebody else, not me.”

In 2024, they performed at music festival Coachella, attended a White House state dinner in Washington, and performed at Tokyo Dome and Osaka’s Kyocera Dome for the first time to around 170,000 people.

“One of our sets when we played the Domes was a recreation of Ayase’s apartment (from five years ago). The fact that we were singing there, in that space, but in the middle of Tokyo and Kyocera Dome – that was so surreal to me,” Ikura recalled.

While this set was not recreated for the Singapore shows, which were smaller in scale than their domestic tour, there was a dynamic energy between the audience and the duo, both of whom feel more comfortable and adept at connecting with their fans now than when they last played here in 2024.

At their Feb 23 concert, they interacted often with fans, especially those standing in the mosh pit. At one point, Ayase and Ikura, who both mostly spoke in Japanese without an interpreter, brought a female fan onstage to translate what they said.

Ikura said: “Fans here are really passionate and react so quickly to what we say. Even if some of them don’t understand Japanese, they will still give us so much of their enthusiasm.”

Yet, their whirlwind success comes with its own set of challenges. Ayase previously told Billboard Japan in an interview that he suffered from burnout around January 2024.

“I’m all good now,” he told ST. “It’s been about a year. I don’t think I had any specific way of dealing with it. It was as if my passion and spirit dimmed, and I felt very exhausted then.

“So, I just did things like drinking with my friends, and finding small things I enjoyed – like playing games – amid my busy work schedule, and slowly healed myself again. And then my love for music and zest for life returned.”

“Humans need rest,” he added, a sentiment Ikura agreed with.

She said: “You have to be healthy in mind and body to keep doing your job. That’s something I feel very strongly about.”