Concert review: Seventeen glow up from boys-next-door to superstars

Seventeen Right Here World Tour in Singapore

National Stadium
Jan 25

The last time K-pop boy band Seventeen performed in Singapore, they played to a sold-out 10,000-strong crowd for a one-night-only show at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in October 2022, leaving fans clamouring for more.

This time, the 13-piece group – made up of S.Coups, Jeonghan, Joshua, Jun, Hoshi, Wonwoo, Woozi, DK, Mingyu, The8, Seungkwan, Vernon and Dino – sold out a much bigger venue at the 55,000-capacity National Stadium, though exact attendance figures were not revealed. They will play another show at the same venue on Jan 26.

Jeonghan and Jun sat out the tour. Jeonghan is fulfilling his mandatory military service in South Korea while Jun has clashing acting commitments in China.

Back in 2022, Seventeen felt like boisterous boys-next-door with their cheeky and relaxed interactions with fans. Now, more than two years on, they are bona fide superstars after making history with album sale records and their EP FML, which became the best-selling album worldwide in 2023.

From the moment of their opening song, the dramatic angst-ridden Fear (2019), with dancers and a long stage spanning the entire length of the stadium all drenched in fiery red, there was no doubt this tour was a glow-up, a victory lap of sorts.

The scale was much more massive, the production was more expensive and the members were more mature.

During their ending remarks, multiple members marvelled at the size of the stadium. One got the sense that while Seventeen probably never expected to stand in the middle of sold-out stadiums and arenas around the world, they had lost any imposter syndrome they might have possessed. They knew they deserved to be where they were.

Seventeen have always been consummate performers. This time was no different with their stellar dance moves and live singing, but they were now much more confident and self-assured.

That sense of ease came through in how willing they were to improvise and play out of the box.

While it might be quite a sting that fan favourite Our Dawn Is Hotter Than Day (2018) was cut from Right Here’s original South Korea set list for the Asia tour – there were extremely disappointed sighs from two Japanese fans behind this reviewer – Seventeen more than made up for it.

Very often during talk segments, they sang and danced without music to numbers that were not in the set list given to the media. For example, Hoshi, during his self-introduction, was joined by his BSS sub-unit members Seungkwan and DK for an impromptu performance of their latest single CBZ (Prime Time), released earlier in January.

They also led fans in singing Ready To Love (2021), Darl+ing (2022) and SOS (2023). And while their last number was meant to be the band’s hit song Very Nice (2016), according to their set list, the members kept on singing. They also performed Hot (2022) and Holiday (2018), and Hoshi led the group to dance to Cheers (2018).

They even pretended to say goodbye and leave the stage after their designated encore, before running out again for more songs.

Remarkably, the band managed to tread the tightrope between the scale of their concert and how intimate it felt.

That came down to the way they had fun on stage. DK, who mentioned Singapore’s signature dish chilli crab incessantly during the show, jokingly did a crab walk; Vernon pretended to be asleep at one point; and The8 and Seungkwan did comical imitations of the absent members Jun and Jeonghan respectively during their opening remarks.

That was not to say there were no hiccups. Mingyu slipped and fell backwards during the energetic dance track Super (2023). His pants also seemed to split open at one point, so S.Coups loaned him a jacket to tie around his waist. But the recovery was so swift that it never interfered with one’s enjoyment of the show.

The group’s charm and the quality of their performance made for a satisfying and endlessly entertaining three hours.