CORTIS performed at a sold-out YouTube Theater in Inglewood yesterday, and I think the easiest way to explain this concert is that I didn’t really watch one concert.
I watched two.
Martin, James, Juhoon, Seonghyeon and Keonho are still at an unusual point in their career. They are already touring North America. They are already selling out venues in the United States. They have the skill, the audience and an extraordinary amount of momentum behind them.
What they don’t have yet is a massive catalog.
That became one of the most common criticisms of this tour even before I walked into YouTube Theater: Why launch a full concert tour when you don’t have enough songs to fill a traditional two-hour show?
After seeing what they actually did with the problem, however, I think the answer is more interesting than simply, “Well, they repeated some songs.”
They did repeat songs. I didn’t mind.
It Was Basically Two Events in One
The first half of the concert was much closer to what you would expect from a traditional K-pop concert. CORTIS performed the released versions of their songs with the choreography, staging and structure we already know.
This was the part where you could really watch them.
You could pay attention to the choreography. You could listen to the vocals. You could see the synchronization and individual performance styles. You could actually study what each member was doing onstage.
Then the second half loosened its tie, threw the choreography out the window and basically said: Fine. We’re having a party now.
The atmosphere completely changed.
Instead of recreating the same performances, they started freestyling, changing vocal deliveries, hyping the audience and spending considerably more time interacting with everyone. Several times, they went down into the audience. At one point, they even found a way to turn the entire theater into part of the song, dividing the audience and creating harmonies that effectively produced another version of the track in real time.
CORTIS simply does not have enough released music yet to perform two hours of completely different material. One obvious solution would have been covers. They certainly have a rather convenient corporate family tree. Between BTS and TXT alone, they could raid the HYBE pantry and probably survive for another 40 minutes.
They chose not to.
Instead, they treated the repetition almost like reprises. The first time, you watched the performance. The second time, you participated in it. And for me, it worked.
Would it work as well for somebody who is not already a fan? Maybe not. If you’re going into the concert primarily wanting 20 or 25 different songs, the repetition could absolutely bother you.
But YouTube Theater is also an intimate venue compared with the arenas and stadiums these groups eventually aspire to play. At a sold-out show of this size, the audience is naturally going to lean heavily toward people who already know the music. CORTIS took advantage of that intimacy.
The second act felt less like, “Here is another performance for you to watch,” and more like, “Come hang out with us.”
And that gave us something arguably more valuable at this stage of their career: CORTIS relatively raw and unfiltered.
Yes, They Were Singing Live
Let’s deal with this because I know people are going to ask. They sang live.
There has been discussion about CORTIS relying heavily on backing tracks, but hearing them inside the venue made the live vocals very apparent. More importantly, there were constant little changes that made it difficult to mistake what was happening.
Martin and James, in particular, played around with their deliveries. There were screams, growls, ad-libs and small melodic changes. James occasionally altered lines rather than reproducing the studio recording exactly. I even noticed a couple of moments when he deliberately didn’t enter until partway through a bar while holding the microphone against his chest and looking toward the audience.
Whether that was deliberately meant to say, “SEE? MICROPHONE. MOUTH. LIVE VOCALS,” I obviously cannot know. But message received.
What impressed me more was the stability.
These boys were jumping around like kangaroos on crack and somehow remained remarkably in control of their voices.
And I don’t mean that they “ate the CD,” because that’s almost the opposite of what made the performance interesting. They didn’t sound exactly like the recording. They changed things. Some lines became rougher. Some became bigger. There were additional screams and ad-libs. The performances were adjusted for the room and for the energy of a live audience.
That is what I want from a concert. If I wanted the CD, I have Apple Music.
You Understand Their Voices Better Live
One thing that became much clearer to me at this concert was just how different their voices are from one another.
Recordings inevitably go through production, mixing and post-engineering. Live, you hear more of the natural resonance of someone’s voice—the characteristics that make that voice specifically theirs.
With CORTIS, those differences are surprisingly pronounced.
Martin has an obvious rock influence in his delivery. He has talked about growing up listening to rappers but also rock bands, and live, you can really hear that history. He growls. He screams. He attacks certain lines with this roughness that feels closer to a rock frontman than the polished delivery we normally associate with idol performances.
Juhoon, meanwhile, has this almost ridiculously relaxed quality to his voice. Even when everything around him is moving at full speed, there is a grounded, mellow quality underneath it. He can be jumping, yelling and performing hard, but vocally there is still this underlying chillness to him.
Seonghyeon’s voice strikes me very differently. There is a smoothness and fluidity there that makes me curious what he would sound like doing more R&B. There is something naturally romantic in his delivery—not necessarily romantic in subject matter, but in the way he carries a melody. There is warmth and feeling there that I think would fit that genre extremely well.
Keonho sounds young to me, which makes perfect sense because he is the youngest. There is still a brightness and youthful height to his voice, with a slight pop-rock quality that, to my ear, occasionally lands somewhere around a much younger version of the type of voice you might associate with Maroon 5.
And that voice is almost certainly going to change. That is actually part of what made hearing him now so interesting.
Then there is James.
James probably has the most unusual vocal resonance in the group to my ear. I kept trying to find the correct word for it during the concert, and the closest I can get is unvarnished.
Not untrained. Not uncontrolled. Unvarnished.
There is something about his delivery, especially when he reaches higher notes, that doesn’t feel obsessed with making every moment sound immaculate. It sometimes feels like he is following the emotion first and allowing the voice to land where the emotion takes it.
It gives his singing a slightly unfinished edge.And I mean that as a compliment.
It is a diamond-in-the-rough quality that could become very interesting depending on how he develops it.
And Then You Watch James Dance
James is the main dancer, so obviously expectations are already high.
But watching him live gives you details that cameras sometimes flatten.
You see the force behind the pops. You see the height of the jumps. You see the transitions and the flow through his body. You see exactly how much physical strength is being used to make something look effortless.
And then you remember that he is doing all of this while singing.
That applies to the entire group. Watching five people execute detailed choreography in synchronization while maintaining live vocals is one of those things that can become weirdly normalized in K-pop because we see it constantly through screens.
Then you watch it happen ten or twenty feet away from you and remember:
Oh. This is actually insane.
That They’re Still Raw
This was my second time seeing CORTIS. The first was during NBA weekend, when they performed only around six or seven songs.
Even between those two performances, I could see progression in their stage presence.
But they’re still raw. Very raw. And I think that is one of the most exciting things about watching them right now.
You can clearly see the talent. You can clearly see the training. You can clearly see the work they have put into the choreography and vocals.
But you can also see five very young performers who appear determined to use every single second they’re given onstage. They don’t conserve much.
If they’re not singing their own part, they’re jumping. If they’re not jumping, they’re yelling. If they’re not yelling, they’re hyping somebody else. If they’re not doing that, they’re probably halfway into the audience.
At some point I wanted to hand them electrolytes.
There is an almost reckless amount of youthful energy in the performance. They are trying to make every second count.
And that isn’t sophistication. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s hunger.
There Are Different Kinds of Stage Presence
I go to a lot of concerts. It is one of the great pleasures—and probably one of the few luxuries—I allow myself.
And after seeing enough artists live, you start realizing that stage presence isn’t one thing.
BTS, for example, now performs with what I would call the swagger of success.
That isn’t arrogance. It is the command that comes from more than a decade of grinding, thousands upon thousands of miles traveled, massive concerts, failures, hardships, victories and eventually reaching a point where they know exactly what they can do to an audience.
They walk onto a stage knowing it belongs to them.
Beyoncé has a completely different kind of command. She performs like a queen surveying the kingdom she personally built. There is enormous control there—the confidence of someone who has spent decades mastering her body, voice, craft and audience.
Muse has its own version of that power.
There are plenty of excellent singers and dancers in the world. There are considerably fewer performers who can simply stand onstage and somehow bend an entire venue toward them.
CORTIS isn’t there yet. Of course they’re not. They’re babies in career terms. But the raw material is there.
I don’t just think CORTIS can become a great K-pop group. I think they potentially have the ingredients to become genuinely great live performers—the kind who eventually command a stage rather than simply perform well on it.
That takes years. You cannot speed-run stage command. But you can see the beginnings of it.
They’re Still Figuring Out Who They Are Onstage
This is CORTIS’ first tour, and they are already doing something fairly extraordinary: touring the United States this early in their career.
You can also see them figuring things out in real time.
I actually understand this somewhat from being a content creator. You can have all the technical knowledge in the world, but finding your voice in front of a camera takes repetition. You try things. Some work. Some don’t. You get more comfortable. You discover what feels natural and what feels like you’re wearing somebody else’s clothes.
Performers go through their own version of that process.
With Martin, you can already see where some of his comfort zone lives. The rock influence gives him a vocabulary for what to do when a performance becomes less structured: scream, jump, growl, attack the stage.
James has dance. Remove the choreography and he can freestyle because movement is already his language.
With the others, you can sometimes see the experimentation more clearly. They’re interacting, dancing, jumping, testing how far they can push something and gradually discovering what feels natural to them.
That doesn’t make the show feel like we’re being used as guinea pigs.
Quite the opposite.
It feels like they’re taking the audience through the process with them.
Unfortunately, Keonho was injured and both of his hands were in casts, so obviously he could not perform at 100 percent. He spent portions of the first half seated on a small couch while the choreography was happening. During the looser second section, however, he was able to participate considerably more because there was less structured dancing.
He still joined the others, sang and moved around when he could. He simply wasn’t jumping around at the same level as everybody else—which, given the two casts, seems like an excellent decision if we would like him to retain ownership of his hands.
Touring This Early Might Be One of the Smartest Things They Could Do
This brings me back to the original criticism. Why tour now? Why tour when you don’t have enough songs?
After watching this show, I actually think touring this early could turn out to be one of the smartest decisions made for their development.
Because they need this. There are things you simply cannot learn in a practice room.
You need to learn how to carry a show for two hours. You need to learn how to read an audience. You need to learn when people are losing energy and how to pull them back. You need to learn what happens when something goes wrong. You need to discover which songs explode live and which ones need rearrangement.
And perhaps most importantly for CORTIS, they are songwriters and creators themselves.
I would be surprised if touring doesn’t eventually change the music they make.
Once you’ve stood in a room and felt which beats make thousands of people jump, which lines they scream back at you and which moments create silence, you start understanding your own music differently.
They’re learning those lessons incredibly early. Which means they may also evolve incredibly early. Basically, they’re grinding XP while everyone is complaining that they haven’t unlocked enough songs yet.
From YouTube Theater to SoFi?
At one point, Juhoon pointed out something rather ambitious.
YouTube Theater sits right beside SoFi Stadium.
And he essentially told the audience that the next time CORTIS comes back, he wants to see everyone next door.
At SoFi. Okay, sir. No pressure. But here’s the thing. I can see it. I’m not saying they’re ready to walk into SoFi tomorrow. A stadium is an entirely different monster. But given their current trajectory, I don’t think that ambition sounds ridiculous.
And if they eventually do make it next door, I am almost certain the CORTIS performing there will be very different from the CORTIS I watched yesterday.
They’ll probably be more refined. More sophisticated. More confident.
They’ll understand pacing better. They’ll know their individual stage identities better. Their voices will continue developing. Their catalog will be larger. Their songwriting will have been influenced by hundreds of hours spent performing in front of real people.
They will have more tools. More experience. More superpowers. And ironically, that’s exactly why I’m so glad I saw them now.
I Wanted to See Them Before the Superpowers
There is something special about seeing an artist before everything becomes polished.
I was fortunate enough to experience something similar with BTS. I became a fan early enough to watch enormous parts of that evolution happen—the mistakes, experimentation, growth, refinement and eventually the almost frightening command they developed over massive stages.
I don’t know exactly where CORTIS’ career will end up.
Nobody does.
But I do think they’re headed toward something very big. I think they have the potential to become one of the biggest acts to come out of South Korea in this generation, and if that happens, everything about them will evolve much faster than it otherwise would.
Their vocals will mature. Their songwriting will mature. Their performances will mature. Their confidence will change. The rough edges will gradually disappear. And that’s wonderful. That’s what growth is supposed to look like.
But those rough edges are also why seeing CORTIS right now is so interesting.
I got to see five young performers who haven’t completely figured out who they are onstage yet, but already know that when somebody gives them a stage, they’re going to throw absolutely everything they have at it.
Maybe someday I’ll see them perform next door at SoFi Stadium.
If I do, I’m sure I’ll be watching a stronger, more polished, more sophisticated version of CORTIS.
But I will never see this CORTIS again. The raw one. The hungry one.
The one still figuring out its powers.
And I’m very glad I got to see them before they went Super Saiyan.
