Kpop band BTS plans 2 April concerts at Levi’s
The South Korean boy band BTS is scheduled to kick off its 2020 North American stadium tour with a pair of dates at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on April 25 and 26, promoter LiveNation announced on Tuesday, Jan. 21.
The sevenmember Kpop group — made up of Suga, JHope, RM, Jimin, V, Jungkook and Jin — plans to return to the United States as part of a tour in support of its fourth studio album, “Map of the Soul: 7,” which arrives Feb. 21.
Tickets go on sale to the general public at 3 p.m. Feb. 7, at LiveNation.com. BTS Army fan club members will be able to purchase Ticketmaster verified tickets starting at 3 p.m. Feb. 5.
As part of the Map of the Soul tour, BTS is scheduled to also perform in Los Angeles, Dallas, Orlando, Atlanta, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Toronto and Chicago before setting off for dates in Japan and Europe.
The group is also slated to headline a fournight stand at Olympic Stadium in Seoul on April 1112 and 1819.
BTS (short for the Korean expression Bangtan Sonyeondan, which translates to Bulletproof Boy Scouts) made history in 2017 as the only Korean act to win a Billboard Music Award. In 2018, they became the first Kpop group to top the Billboard 200 chart with “Love Yourself: Tear,” the only foreignlanguage album to reach No. 1 since 2006.
Last year, BTS was the first Kpop act to present at the Grammy Awards.
The group’s new record comes less than a year after it released the EP “Map of the Soul: Persona.” While the boy band’s popularity appears to be at an alltime high, it did not receive any Grammy nominations this year.
Along with the stadium tour,
BTS announced last week that it would fund 22 art installations curated by Daehyung Lee in London, Seoul, New York, Berlin and Buenos Aires. The band said the purpose of the “Connect, BTS” project is to “send a positive message to the world (and) give back some of the amazing love that we receive.”
The first single from the new album, “Black Swan,” is accompanied by a short art film featuring Slovenian group MN Dance Company. The band members do not appear in the video.
“BTS dives deep into their inner selves as artists and faces the shadows they had once hidden,” said a news release sent out with the clip. “The song lends voice to their fears that one day music will no longer be able to move or touch them. The very moment they come face to face with the ‘Black Swan’ within themselves, however, they are stricken with a paradoxical realization that music is all they have. It is a confession of an artist who has truly learned what music means to himself.”
BTS made its Bay Area headlining debut in September 2018 at Oakland Arena, where fans camped overnight on the surrounding Oakland Coliseum complex and paid upward of $2,500 for tickets for the soldout show on the secondary market.