BIGBANG XX: COSMOS in Oakland — Nine Years Gone, Still Their Room
BIGBANG's first U.S. shows in nine years earned the nostalgia they were selling, because a 31-song setlist made room for genuine solo identity and one quietly devastating tribute to the member no longer on stage - even though a show already pushing two hours and forty-five minutes didn't need two separate video interludes bookending its own encore.
The trio played the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum on September 4 and 5, their first American performances since 2017. The second night sold out in 30 minutes once tickets went on sale, and by the time G-Dragon, Taeyang and Daesung walked out under a stage built around a "Cosmos" theme - a mobile LED structure filled with planet and constellation imagery, 20 dancers, pyrotechnics and confetti - nobody in the building needed convincing this was worth the wait.
What the theatrics couldn't do alone was make the show feel current, and BIGBANG mostly didn't try to. The opening run of "Fantastic Baby," "Hands Up" and "Tonight" functioned as a victory lap through material the crowd already knew by heart, backed by a four-piece live band led by producer Wow Jones. "If You," "Bad Boy," "Bae Bae" and "Haru Haru" pulled the show into softer, older territory before the set found its shape again.
The individual segments are where "XX: COSMOS" argued for itself as more than a reunion tour. Daesung moved from the ballad "Universe" and "Wings" into the trot numbers "Hando Chogua" and "Look at Me Gwisun," a genre swing that shouldn't work in a stadium and did anyway. Taeyang leaned into his R&B catalog with "Bad," "Ringa Linga" and "Live Fast Die Slow." G-Dragon took the largest chunk of the middle set - "Power," "Crayon," "Crooked" - and used it the way he always has, treating a stadium floor like it's still his.
The show's best moment wasn't a song at all. During "Still Life," the three members sat together on stage while former member T.O.P's original vocal part played through the speakers, unaltered. They'd already performed their own parts elsewhere in the set. Leaving his voice untouched here, rather than cutting around it, was the most direct thing BIGBANG said all night about who's actually missing from this reunion.
The reunion push - "Bang Bang Bang," "Sober," "We Like 2 Party" - landed as pure crowd noise, and new material "Biiig" and "Home Sweet Home" slotted in without disrupting the momentum. "I keep trying to find our master plan to bring our golden days back," G-Dragon told the crowd mid-show, which is either the most honest thing a reunited act can say from a stadium stage or the most calculated - "XX: COSMOS" didn't fully settle which.
Where the show dragged was structural, not musical. The setlist opens with a video interlude before a note is sung, and a second one shows up again right before the final stretch of the encore - "My Heaven," "Sunset Glow," "Last Farewell," "Feeling," "Flower Road." In a show already running two and a half hours, breaking the momentum a second time that close to the end is the one choice in an otherwise tightly built night that reads like a leftover from BIGBANG's stadium-tour playbook rather than something this particular show needed.
This review is written from setlist data, video footage circulated after both shows and published gig reports rather than firsthand attendance. That secondhand vantage can reconstruct what was played and how the room reacted, but not how the mix actually sounded standing on the Coliseum floor.
BIGBANG's "XX: COSMOS" tour continues September 11 at MetLife Stadium, followed by Stade de France on September 19 and Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on September 26.
