SINGAPORE – Japanese singer-songwriter Joji, slated to perform for the first time in Singapore at ZoukOut, has pulled out due to health reasons, just days before Asia’s longest-running dance music festival.
The announcement was made on Nov 29 on the event’s Facebook and Instagram pages.
The popular former YouTuber, 31, was slated to perform from 6.30 to 7.45pm on Dec 2.
ZoukOut 2023, presented by OCBC, will take place on Dec 2 and 3 at Sentosa’s Siloso Beach, the same venue where the event was first held in 2000.
Joji, whose real name is George Kusunoki Miller, began releasing music under Asian-American record label 88rising in 2017.
His first EP, In Tongues (2017), contains the hits Will He and Demons.
His most popular numbers are the soft ballads Glimpse Of Us (2022) and Slowly Dancing In The Dark (2018), which have each been played on Spotify more than 1.1 billion times.
He is currently on his Pandemonium world tour, in support of his third studio album Smithereens (2022). His Oct 6 performance at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena drew 20,000 fans.
Joji last performed at Bangkok’s Queen Sirikit National Convention Center on Nov 26.
He has also cancelled his gigs in Kuala Lumpur on Nov 30 and Hong Kong on Dec 3, which he announced in an Instagram Story on Nov 29, adding: “I will be back, I promise.”
A ZoukOut spokesperson told The Straits Times there will be no change to the ZoukOut line-up as Joji was a “special guest”.
Headliners Alesso and Martin Garrix along with Illenium, Acraze, Fisher and Wukong are still slated to perform.
Social media reaction to Joji’s absence from ZoukOut has been mostly negative, with some netizens saying that tickets for the Dec 2 show will be “losing (their) value”.
Book It/ZoukOut 2023 presented by OCBC
Where: Siloso Beach, Sentosa
When: Dec 2 (from 3pm) and Dec 3 (from 1pm)
Admission: From $188 via Ticketmaster (go to ticketmaster.sg or call 3158-8588) and at SingPost outlets
