SMTOWN Live takes over The O2 for an epic four-hour K-pop showcase

While the careers of Western pop puppeteers like Cowell (and Simon Fuller and Lou Pearlman and so on) and their respective groups have fizzled out, thirty years on, the stars coming out of Lee’s factory still burn brightly. His roster, known collectively as SMTOWN, have been releasing compilation albums since 1999, and as of 2008, it’s been taken on the road, sort of like a massive X Factor live tour, but if it was made up of all-stars instead of just the flopping finalists. With this year marking the 30th anniversary of SM Entertainment, the tour pays its first visit to London, hitting The O2 arena for a four-hour speed run of the past, present and future of K-pop.

The oldest group on the roster, TVXQ!, kick off proceedings with ‘Rising Sun’, a storming hit dating back to 2005. From there, we’re catapulted into the future with a double SMTOWN Rookies (that’s the trainees who are set to debut when the right groups are built) cover performance of two legendary SM hits: SHINee’s ‘Lucifer’ and EXO’s ‘Growl’.

Then it’s onto Hearts2Hearts, the company’s latest girl group who perform their peppy, sugary singles ‘The Chase’ and ‘Butterflies’, then the British boy band dearALICE, who underwent an intense 100-day training regime with SM before launching last year. Both acts give it their all, but putting the newest first sort of ends up feeling like they’re the support slot before the big show.

It’s a slow start, made even slower by every act stopping between their assigned two tracks to speak to the audience, but there’s an instant increase in decibels as soon as the less green acts start arriving. RIIZE, fresh off the release of their debut full-length ‘ODYSSEY’, shine in the arena. Hitting that sweet point where they’ve been going long enough to be comfortable on a massive stage, but are fresh enough to have a noticeable fire in their bellies, the breakbeat-laden ‘Ember to Solar’ immediately pushes the show into a higher gear.

The roaring continues for aespa, undeniably the it-girl-group of the moment who’ve already conquered The O2 under their own name. Their choices, ‘Whiplash’ and ‘Next Level’, in all their wonky, experimental pop glory, prove exactly why they were able to do that. Then it’s a brief return to the classics for Red Velvet and their biggest hit, ‘Bad Boy’; it’s sweet and sultry, and another ten years down the line, its legend status will be cemented.

From there, they cover Girls’ Generation’s ‘Run Devil Run’, and it becomes apparent that, in the absence of some older groups, the label’s active big hitters would perform covers. This later sees EXO cover the founding fathers of K-pop H.O.T. and their track ‘Git It Up!’, and then, oddly, TVXQ! return to cover Red Velvet’s ‘Psycho’, which is very good, but wouldn’t we rather see the girls do it?

While the colour green may have belonged to a certain bratty pop star for the last year, it’s been the representative colour of a K-pop mega-group for much longer. So as Worthy Farm basks in green this Saturday night, so does The O2 because there’s no escaping what this is: an NCT show. The generation-spanning boy group (whose 25 members have the oldest at 30 and the youngest at 17) make up a considerable portion of the lineup, with four sub-units taking to the stage to perform their respective tracks. NCT WISH, the most recent group, go first; like RIIZE, they’re slick, tight, and keen to prove their worth, their adoption into the NCT family keeping them from feeling too new.

For NCT DREAM, it’s their third visit to the city, and they’re clearly so loved here (the bouncy ‘When I’m With You’ and fiery ‘Smoothie’ go down a treat), while their eldest counterparts NCT 127 prove to be the main event, as the show serves as their first concert here since 2019. Their sound is so massive and earth-shakingly arena-built that it’s ridiculous they haven’t played The O2 on their own merit yet. In between them plays WayV, the Chinese group and perhaps the most underrated of the units, whose sexy R&B-tinged pop is performed this time in Korean and English.

The show then arrives at a solos section featuring fragments of the most established SM groups. SUHO, CHANYEOL and KAI of EXO, MINHO of SHINee, and HYO of Girls Generation each perform their solo tracks, with KAI, a born superstar, standing out the most; his natural charisma and stage flair showing he could carry a whole arena show on his own. HYO’s performance of ‘DESSERT’ proves another highlight, she’s been in the game so long that being on stage is second nature, and the addition of aespa’s GISELLE and WayV’s YANGYANG makes for the kind of torch-passing moment these shows are really about.

Then we reload it. SMTR25 perform a tribute to SM, and the victory lap begins. A rapid-fire blast through the label’s latest and greatest exports, with one group barely leaving the stage before the next has arrived, you can’t help but feel it should’ve been this high energy the whole time. Tracks like aespa’s ‘Supernova’ and NCT WISH’s ‘poppop’ reveal themselves as potential mainstays in the SM repertoire, while NCT 127’s ‘Kick It’, at only five years old, feels as well worn and beloved as the 17-year-old ‘MIROTIC’ that TVXQ! close the show with.

If the aim is to showcase the breadth and legacy of SM Entertainment, SMTOWN’s first visit to London does exactly that. Yeah, there are annoying omissions, like second-generation boy group SUPER JUNIOR making it to the other shows in the series (that’s Seoul, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Mexico City) and an appearance from the royal highness of K-pop BoA outside of the Asia shows would’ve been the cherry, but the reality is, these sort of things are very hard to pull off. Knowing how many other K-pop ‘festivals’ have been promised London shows and been cancelled at the last minute means it’s a miracle SMTOWN has even gone ahead. K-pop is constantly evolving, and SMTOWN Live is a real taster of how much of that evolution has been in their hands.