“Are we yandao (handsome) band?” a question that answered itself the moment Jung Shin tried out his new Singlish vocabulary: “I’m so yandao”.
That was the kind of energy that went down during CNBLUE’s ‘3LOGY’ Live World Tour in Singapore last Friday at The Star Theatre.
A Long-Awaited Return
Before the concert officially started, fans were clapping along and warming the room up to ‘I’m Sorry’ playing in the background. The band’s last concert in Singapore was back in 2024 and you could definitely feel that BOICE (CNBLUE fans) were ready to dance the night away after the two-year wait.
The set opened with ‘Ready, Set, Go!’ and rolled straight into ‘Catch Me’ and ‘Racer’, the energy snapping into place almost immediately. The Singlish lessons that followed might have been the highlight of the night for many in the crowd. Jung Shin asked how to say handsome in Singlish, got his answer, and committed to it fully. Min Hyuk then enquired about “pretty”, and within seconds had assembled a complete sentence: “I’m yandao, you’re chiobu (pretty).”
From Slow-Burn Moments to Full Bloom
‘Nothing’, ‘Intuition’, and ‘Lowkey’ kept the mid-section of the concert warm and danceable, but it was ‘99%’, which happens to be my personal favourite, that really made BOICE let loose and the energy in the room shifted up a gear. Later, ‘Domino’ saw Yong Hwa step to the keyboard instead of the guitar, a quieter, more intimate moment in the night.
The fan support added something genuinely beautiful to the slower stretch of the set by waving lighted roses during ‘Still, a Flower’, a sea of warm pink light filling the theatre. The blue light sticks earlier had made the crowd look like a wave; the roses made it look like a garden. Yong Hwa noticed, and leaned into it: “Seeing your faces make me feel like I’m looking at flowers. We’re all flowers, let’s bloom together.” He then asked if he could have one of the roses for the stage, joked about taking it back to Korea and hanging it on a Christmas tree, and somehow made it feel entirely sincere.
Inside Jokes and Singalongs
‘LOVE’ landed differently than anyone expected, the band had swapped out “clap clap clap” for “chilli crab crab crab” and “pepper crab crab crab”, and the fans went along with it. I personally felt that ‘I’m Sorry’ was the most hyped song of the night, followed by Killer Joy with a singalong that Yong Hwa conducted with the patience and joy of someone who has done this a thousand times and still means every second of it.
An Encore Worth Waiting For
The encore gave the evening its most beautiful stage: Min Hyuk, Jung Shin, and Yong Hwa singing ‘Again’ together under spinning disco balls, confetti falling, the whole room glowing. Then, unexpectedly, a few bars of Charlie Puth’s ‘See You Again’ and just like that, CNBLUE’s Singapore concert came to an end.
At some point during the encore, it stopped feeling like a performance and started feeling like proof, that a band who made their debut almost 16 years ago can still walk on stage and make it feel like the first time. CNBLUE didn’t just give Singapore BOICE a good show, they gave the impression that they needed it just as much as the fans did.
