K-Pop phenom BTS is making a return trip to the Bay Area in April, and the BTS Army is presumably already losing its collective mind.
The seven-member boy band from South Korea took the American music scene by storm two years ago, and they last made an appearance in the Bay Area in September 2018. Their show at Oakland's Oracle Arena attracted the fan insanity of Beatlemania in the 1960s, as KPIX reported at the time, with tickets going for $1,000 apiece and fans lined up for blocks for a chance to squeeze themselves onto the arena floor.
As Wild 94.9's Crystal Rosas tells KPIX in the video segment above, "There's something about a bunch of boys on stage — foreign boys — singing and dancing... girls love it."
Now the boys of BTS are bringing their Map of the Soul Tour back to North America this spring, and they will be playing not one but two nights at Levi's Stadium on April 25 and 26. Tickets for the shows go on sale two weeks from Friday, on February 7, as KRON 4 reports today. But, of course, BTS Army members get access to a pre-sale.
BTS's new album, also titled Map of the Soul, is due out next month.
As Vulture explained two years ago, BTS was not especially remarkable among their K-Pop peers to begin with, but their stratospheric rise in popularity in the U.S. is unique. The band gained fame in the American nexus of K-Pop fandom, Tumblr, with its album The Most Beautiful Moment back in 2015. "This is the story, then, of how seven young men managed to reach No. 1 on Billboard on the strength of what is essentially the largest, most enthusiastic niche audience in the country," Vulture wrote.
Brace yourselves for a collective fangasm down in Santa Clara in late April.