On January 13, rain fell outside Kentish Town Forum. Umbrellas lined the street in uneven clusters, wrapping around the venue and pooling at the edges of the queue. Angel wings – ARTMS’ recurring visual motif – were everywhere, clipped to jackets and bags, glowing faintly under streetlights. Early January is a difficult time to sell a concert, especially in Europe, but London showed up regardless. This was the opening night of ARTMS’ Grand Club Icarus European leg, and the room felt charged with that awareness.

ARTMS, a five-member group formed in the aftermath of LOONA’s dissolution, opened their European Grand Club Icarus tour in London with a show built around club culture, reinvention, and control.

Inside, the space didn’t resemble a concert hall so much as a club on the verge of ignition. A lone DJ figure stood centre stage within pulsing blue light, pushing distorted drum patterns through the room until the bass felt physical. Liquid DnB textures bled into electro-house remixes of ARTMS tracks, the sound design deliberately disorienting. It felt less like waiting for a show to begin than crossing a threshold – the moment in a night out when you know you’re in the right place.

The lighting shifted to red and, after a cinematic visual screener, ARTMS emerged without pause. Opening with “Goddess” was a statement rather than a warm-up. Built on DnB propulsion, the track arrived with sharp, mythic staging: open-palmed poses, precise facial lines, choreography that mixed controlled menace with fluid body rolls. On the screen, words like Hate, Pain, Fear, Chaos, Despair, and Panic flashed between images of flapping angel wings. Divinity here wasn’t presented as purity, but endurance – a reframing that would quietly anchor the rest of the night.

HeeJin’s energetic call to “London, make some noise” broke the tension just long enough to send the set surging forward. “Goddess” slipped seamlessly into “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” then into the funk-leaning rush of “Burn,” the transitions handled with the precision of a DJ set rather than a traditional pop concert. The effect was momentum without clutter – high energy, but tightly controlled.

What stood out just as clearly was how settled the group felt on stage as a five-piece. The chemistry read as instinctive rather than rehearsed: glances held, spacing loosened, energy shared rather than segmented. Whether that came from the pressure of opening night or from growth over time was hard to say, but it registered unmistakably. ARTMS moved like a group that trusted its own shape.

Midway through the opening section, the members picked up colour-coded microphones – a subtle visual echo of their LOONA era without leaning into nostalgia. The reference felt intentional but restrained: an acknowledgement, not a crutch. ARTMS are no longer interested in proving continuity; they’re focused on establishing presence.

After its opening rush, the set widened its palette. Tracks like “Unf/Air” and “Flower Rhythm” extended the nighttime logic into something moodier and more textural, while “The Dead Dance” – a Lady Gaga cover chosen through the group’s Gravity voting system – arrived as a sharp tonal pivot. Its theatricality didn’t feel like a detour so much as a stress test, proving how elastic the show’s concept could be without snapping. Even here, the internal logic held.

That cohesion became clearer in the second act, where solo stages unfolded less as interruptions and more as deep dives. Introduced by recurring elevator visuals, each performance felt like a different floor within the same structure. Choerry’s “Pressure,” Heejin’s “Video Game,” JinSoul’s “Ring of Chaos,” HaSeul’s “Je Ne Sais Quoi” – a slowed-down remake of the fan-favorite ODD EYE CIRCLE B-side – and Kim Lip’s “Can You Entertain?” each carried distinct emotional weight, yet all sat comfortably within the tour’s sonic language. Rather than spotlighting individuality at the expense of flow, the solos expanded the atmosphere, reinforcing ARTMS’ identity as plural but unified.

Act three leaned darker and heavier. “Distress,” “Obsessed,” and the unreleased “In the Dark” pushed the set into more volatile territory, the lighting tightening into saturated washes that prioritised motion over detail. By the time “Birth” landed, the show had fully embraced its descent narrative – collapse as precondition, chaos as fuel. A DJ break followed, dissolving the boundary between concert and club entirely before “Icarus” re-emerged, its themes of falling and rebirth now fully earned rather than merely suggested.

There was also a quiet historical echo embedded in the night. Three of ARTMS’ members had already stood on this same stage in the summer of 2023 as ODD EYE CIRCLE, the LOONA and ARTMS subunit, returning to live performance in the immediate aftermath of LOONA’s legal unraveling. That appearance felt urgent and provisional – a moment of survival more than arrival. In 2026, their return with ARTMS felt different. Not triumphant, but assured.

Against that backdrop, the line “Reborn, like a phoenix wing” – lifted from “Icarus” – landed with particular force. Not as a slogan, but as a lived trajectory – persistence without certainty, progress without guarantees.

The final act resolved that tension without softening it. “Icarus,” “Verified Beauty,” “Sparkle,” and “Virtual Angel” carried the set toward something brighter but no less deliberate, the imagery circling back to ascent without erasing what came before.

Before the encore, the members paused to address the audience, thanking fans for filling the venue and noting how full it looked from the stage. This was ARTMS’ third visit to London since October 2024, and the ease with which the room responded made clear that this stop marked momentum rather than routine.

If the main set established the world, the encore sold it. Rather than a sentimental victory lap, ARTMS closed with a rapid-fire medley stitched together with the loose, kinetic energy of a DJ set. The pacing, transitions, and crowd response made it feel less like a K-pop encore and more like watching a late-night performance inside a club space. Alive, communal, and unforced.

Visually, the production leaned heavily on silhouette lighting, often reserving it for the closing moments of songs. As tracks resolved, the members were reduced to sharp outlines against washes of colour, their final poses briefly suspended before disappearing into shadow. The effect was striking, turning movement into shape and gesture into afterimage. By withholding clarity at these points of release, the club aesthetic heightened ARTMS’ mystique, searing them into memory as something deliberately elusive – figures closer to the angels and phoenixes of their visual lore than to fixed, fully revealed idols.

As the lights finally came up after the encore, the screen read: Always Welcome to Grand Club Icarus – less a slogan than a closing seal, confirming that what had unfolded wasn’t just a concert, but a world the audience had briefly been allowed to step inside.

What made the show resonate wasn’t scale or spectacle, but conviction. ARTMS didn’t so much as gesture at an idea as they committed to it. In doing so, they’ve stepped out of LOONA’s shadow not by rejecting the past, but by refusing to orbit it. This tour presents ARTMS as a fully realised artistic project – club-forward, myth-literate, and confident enough to let atmosphere do the talking. Not a continuation. Not a footnote. Something that stands on its own.