Japanese literary music duo YOASOBI will return to the Korean stage to play 2024 Weverse Con Festival on June 15, six months after they were in Korea for their concert last December. Since they debuted in 2019 with the release of the song “Racing into the Night,” the collaborative duo hasn’t slowed down for a second. This year, they’ve performed live on a tour of Asia, in smaller Japanese clubs, at American festivals, and countless other concerts—and the result has been a series of shows filled to the brim with passionate energy.
With YOASOBI’s upcoming show in Korea imminent, let’s take a look back on their other concerts to date. We’ll have to make it quick, since there’s not much time left before they take the stage, and we still need to practice singing the words to their songs. We run the gamut below, from their earliest releases, to their biggest hits and latest their latest performances.
“Idol” (YOASOBI ARENA TOUR 2023 DENKŌSEKKA)
If there’s one YOASOBI song pretty much everyone’s heard, it’s “Idol.” This video’s the encore from their concert at Saitama Super Arena during the stadium tour they embarked on last year from April through June. In this June 4 performance, the duo clearly has the entire audience of 19,000 people on the edge of their seats. It’s incredible how much energy and passion ikura and, further back and playing several instruments, Ayase are even after performing the 16 songs leading up to the encore. Check out how seamlessly they transition from the cute, upbeat melody into darker, hard-hitting rap.
“Blue” (YOASOBI ASIA TOUR 2023–2024: LIVE IN SEOUL, KOREA)
Here’s YOASOBI performing “Blue” live on December 17 last year during their own first concert in Korea, which served as the ribbon cutting for their international tour. Tickets were completely sold out as soon as they went on sale in October, as were tickets for an additional show they added later on—where they performed this rendition of “Blue”—proving just how popular the duo’s become. The song, inspired by the manga Blue Period, is the duo’s signature sing-along at concerts. Korean fans are famous for surprising performers visiting from overseas with the passion which with they sing along to their favorites, and this live video shows YOASOBI and their audience in perfect harmony. You can bet the duo and their audience at Weverse Con Festival will be on the same enthusiastic page.
“RGB” (first in-person concert, NICE TO MEET YOU)
This video comes from YOASOBI’s NICE TO MEET YOU concert at the Nippon Budokan arena in 2021, their first chance to perform in front of an audience in the two years since forming during the COVID-19 outbreak, and therefore a significant enough performance to include here. Most Japanese artists make it a goal to play Budokan when touring domestically, but naturally they don’t stop there, moving on to stadium tours of progressively increasing magnitude. YOASOBI is no exception, as they’ve walked the same path toward superstardom. The most impressive part of the performance in this video is the stage direction, placing the artist in the dead center of the audience and lit up with red, green, and blue lights to correspond with the song. Their stage direction shows just how much effort they put toward their desire “to make YOASOBI a strong live band.”
“The Blessing” (TBS’s CDTV LIVE! LIVE! @ GUNDAM FACTORY YOKOHAMA)
In 2022, the duo performed “The Blessing,” the opening theme to the anime Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, in front of Gundam Factory Yokohama. The Witch from Mercury is a notable entry to the overall series and one which made waves even before going to air, not least of all for being the first to feature a woman as its protagonist. The show gave Bandai Namco their highest sales from the franchise since 2008 and attracted a whole new generation of fans. With an extra bump thanks to the show’s popularity, “The Blessing” topped 300 million streams and landed itself on the Billboard JAPAN chart. As enticing as the live atmosphere in the above video is, try and focus instead on how meaningful and cathartic it is for the duo to perform their song alongside a life-size Gundam.
“HEART BEAT” (YOASOBI ZEPP TOUR 2024: POP OUT)
YOASOBI encourages active audience participation and singing along at their shows, like in the performance of “Blue” mentioned earlier, where the duo directly encourages their fans to join in on the vocals. The same goes for when they sang “HEART BEAT” at Zepp Haneda in Tokyo: In the video, you can see the lyrics playing out on a screen behind ikura, who calls out for the audience to sing along. The song was written as the theme for YOASOBI 18Fes, a festival put on by TV network NHK. The group wrote “HEART BEAT” based on short messages, letters, and dance videos submitted by 18-year-olds under the titular theme, and the energetic chorus of the song was recorded with 1,000 teens all singing in harmony. Now, whenever YOASOBI performs the song live, they encourage their audiences to sing along and make the chorus complete.
“Last Resort” (Ayase)
Before forming one half of YOASOBI, Ayase was already a Vocaloid producer. Starting from when he first uploaded the song “Congenital Assault Girl” to Japanese video sharing site Niconico in 2018, he’s constantly had his hand in Vocaloid work, making his earlier work in the genre more or less the origins of YOASOBI. “Last Resort,” which has now been viewed on YouTube over 20 million times, is a must-listen. It’s also a lot of fun to check out some of the other Vocaloid songs Ayase has written and later covered himself with his own vocals, like “Ghost City Tokyo” and “Cinema.”
