Tabber came back to Heaven alone, and London howled for him
Photo: Paola / Zutter.co.uk
On Friday night at Heaven, under the railway arches off Villiers Street, the Korean singer Tabber asked a London crowd to howl for him, and the whole room tipped back its head and did.
It was the London date of Modern Goth, a European run that began in Warsaw on 14 October and ends in Cologne on 25 October, by way of Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. The tour is named after the six-track EP that came out on 8 October.
He has stood on this stage before, in July 2024 when he played Heaven as half of a double bill with the singer Miso, the last stop of a seven-city European tour. On Friday the name on the poster was his alone.
The Korean singer brought his new goth record to London on his own, eight days after its release, with a live guitarist and a room ready to follow him.
What happened in between is the story of an artist who spent six years being admired from the edge of other people's songs, and who now has a room that comes for him.
Zutter attended as a guest of the promoter, Seoul Therapi. Article by Paola and Daily Matcha.
A deliberate counterweight
Before any of the black, there was warmth. Ezra Wood, a UK-based contemporary R&B singer supporting the London and Paris dates, sang from behind a keyboard with his band, working through songs including 'Pullup' and 'Bad Omen'.
His set was light and unhurried: soft moods, open chords, nothing sharp. Placed where it was, it worked as a deliberate counterweight, the last warm room before the lights went grey.
Strict greyscale
The lights dropped and stayed down. For most of the night the backdrop was a single hanging sheet of clear plastic, the kind a thriller tapes over every surface just before the murder, lit in strict greyscale and cut with strobe. Behind it, half visible through the plastic, stood a DJ.
Tabber walked out dressed in the style of Ghost, the skull-masked soldier from Call of Duty, down to the black military vest. He had left the mask off. Next to the costume, the plastic made sense. Halloween was a fortnight away.
He opened with three songs from the new record, 'Smokey Eye', 'Modern Goth' and 'Fashion Faux Pas', and did not stop to explain any of them. The look did the explaining.
The make-up did the work of the missing mask. His face was pale and the black eyeshadow ran all the way round each eye, so that under the white light he read like a skull.
That is by design. Speaking to Rolling Stone Korea in June, he said he likes styles that show a new direction, even if the public finds them a little strange at first, and treats clothes not as a way to look pretty but as armour you wear to go into battle. On Friday the armour was close to literal: a military vest, white paint and black eyeshadow.
In the same interview he boiled his idea of a modern goth down to four words: alienation, solitude, night and gloom. Asked by Esquire Korea for the songs that made him, he put The Cure on the list, the band he said he most associates with goth. For a London room, the reference was close to home.
The first take
Live, the record's polish came off. His voice stayed rough at the edges all night, as if every song were the first take and he had decided to keep it. The tour's big addition to the stage, a live guitarist, pushed the darker tracks toward something closer to an American garage band than a Seoul R&B session.
It suits a man who has lived in the United States since high school. Meeting people from all over the world there has taught him what he needed to express as an artist.
The swagger was new too. He moved constantly, jumped across the stage and held the crowd with the confidence of someone who no longer needs a famous name beside him to be noticed.
I like my old songs
Then he stepped back through the catalogue. "I like my old songs too," he told the crowd, and spent the next stretch proving it.
Out came the collaborations: '007', his 2022 song with Syd; 'Bébé', the SUMIN feature from the new EP; 'Being', the 2023 title track he made with Baek Yerin; and 'Chi-Ka', his 2024 single with DEAN.
'Chi-Ka' is named after his cat. It is also the Korean sound of brushing your teeth, and he told Wave that someone's toothbrush left behind, seemed the right object for a wistful feeling. He had the title before even 20% of the song existed. The cat may be on the cover too. On Instagram, Tabber has posted a photo of it with the single's artwork held up over one of its eyes, and the eye on the cover lines up.
Lined up together, they told the shape of his career more plainly than any biography. It was built in duets, standing slightly to one side of more famous voices, until his was the one people remembered. He reached further back still, to 'Wake Up', a song from his 2021 run on Mnet's rap competition Show Me The Money 10. Mid-song he threw in a nod to London's Abbey Road and batted rhymes between Korean, English and French like a ping-pong rally.
Eye level
Midway through, he left the main stage for a small platform almost at the crowd's eye level. The front of the room surged forward to meet him.
Then the rig cut to a single cold white light, and the dark filled with phone torches held overhead. For a few seconds, from where we stood among the phones, nobody knew what came next.
The room had the particular nerves of a first date, the pause before someone leans in. Phones stayed up. Nobody wanted to miss his face.
That was when he asked them to howl. He took the first note himself, the leader of the pack, and the room answered, then answered louder, until the whole of Heaven was following his lead.
Lovers close their eyes
Near the end came 'New Moon', the single that opened this chapter in May. Its premise, as the release described it, is the private world two lovers share when they close their eyes, built on 1980s synthesisers and heavy drums.
He told Rolling Stone Korea it was his first time going back to an 80s sound, and that the work was in turning it into "2026 music". Asked by the magazine what he sees when he closes his eyes, he kept it to five words: "I see a fun future" .
Under the greyscale, with the howl still hanging in the air, it sounded less like a retro exercise than a lullaby with teeth.
A happy ending
In June, Rolling Stone Korea asked him how a film called Tabber should end. "A happy ending with no regrets," he said, "having done everything I wanted to do" (translation ours).
Friday felt like the scene just before it. Six years ago he was the voice people noticed on someone else's track. At Heaven the duets were his back catalogue, and the songs he made alone opened the show.
The film is not finished. The tour moved on to Amsterdam on Saturday, then Berlin, Paris and Cologne, and its own announcement has already teased Latin American dates.
Anyone arriving for the polish of an idol concert would have found the opposite: one plastic sheet, a greyscale rig, a voice left rough on purpose and a setlist that rewards knowing the duets. Nobody at the front seemed to be asking for anything else.
Online, he has always gone by honjowolf. On Friday, for the length of one howl under one cold white light, everyone else in Heaven also became wolves.
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