When RIIZE goes out to dinner, it’s a 20-person affair.
On this particular Sunday evening, the pioneering South Korean mega-label SM Entertainment has reserved a private room at a hot spot in Los Angeles’ Koreatown popular with music artists for its new boy band. The six members file in around a long table — along with an SM-associated translator (who is occasionally assisted by two other team members), a publicist from RCA Records (an SM partner for RIIZE), a veteran manager from Seoul and eight additional crew members who sit in a nearby booth.
The Korean group is in town for its RIIZING DAY Fan-Con Tour tomorrow — a “fan-concert” where the group intersperses choreographed performances of its own K-pop hits with casual games, informal onstage chats among themselves and special covers of both K-pop classics and global boy band hits, like One Direction’s “One Thing.” It’s RIIZE’s first time headlining a show in the United States, but its third group visit to L.A. Before the May 20 concert, the group flew here in August to attend the city’s annual KCON K-pop mega-fest and also filmed two music videos in town: the jovial “Memories” (a pre-debut single that generated buzz for the group that month) and its official debut single, “Get a Guitar,” a slick, bubblegum earworm released in both Korean and English that’s now RIIZE’s most streamed song globally, with 219.6 million official on-demand streams since its September release, according to Luminate.
Read full Billboard cover story about RIIZE and what they’re up to here.
