Back in 2023, Slovenian band Joker Out represented their country at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song ‘Carpe Diem’. While they may have only placed 21st in the final, they captured the hearts of many fans across the continent. Ever since the contest, the band has been steadily touring all throughout Europe. As part of their 2025 tour, the band made a stop at Tilburg’s Poppodium 013 on the 19th of November.
At 18:15, the first and most dedicated fans were let into the venue’s Next Stage to watch part of Joker Out’s soundcheck. As soon as that was done, just after 19:00, the rest of the audience was allowed to slowly but steadily trickle in as well. The room, which holds approximately 700 visitors, was absolutely packed and buzzing with anticipation in the hour before the band would take to the stage. A few minutes past 20:00, the intro began playing over the speakers as the stage lights flashed red and the crowd clapped. One by one, the band members took to the stage: lead singer Bojan Cvjetićanin, guitarists Kris Guštin and Jan Peteh (who also plays the keys), bassist Nace Jordan, and drummer Jure Maček. Guštin, who happens to be part-Dutch, was wearing a shirt that said “we gaan hard, we gaan lekkaâh hoâr”, which led to a lot of laughter from the audience.
The band opened the night with their newest single, ‘Supersonic’. As soon as the song was over, Cvjetićanin addressed the crowd to say how impressed he was that the fans packed the venue on a Wednesday and that the show would not be too serious. “Sing, dance, look goofy, feel silly,” he said, before moving onto ‘Bele sanje’ and ‘Muzika Za Decu’. Right from the get-go, the five band members made use of the entire stage to dance and switch places amongst the several mic stands and instruments. The band are clearly good friends that have a lot of fun on stage. Before continuing with ‘Ona’, a fan held up fan-art she’d made, which Cvjetićanin just had to have – and so it was passed to him with the help of other fans.
“Let’s go to Tokyo!” Cvjetićanin then said, after teaching the audience some Japanese words that are part of the lyrics of, you guessed it, ‘Tokio’. Meanwhile, Guštin had been gifted a plushie of a hamster wearing Sinterklaas’ outfit, and Jordan had put on colourful bunny ears. The band followed with ‘Stephanie’, ‘Dopamin’, and ‘Katrina’, during which Cvjetićanin was playing the guitar for the first time tonight. “Play us a love story, Jan,” Cvjetićanin said when the latter was finished, asking Peteh to play a little guitar solo as the introduction to ‘A sem ti podeval’. Throughout the entire night, Cvjetićanin kept thanking the audience in Dutch: “Dankjewel!”.
About halfway through the set, after playing fan-favourite ‘Plastika’, Cvjetićanin taught the audience the easy lyrics of the chorus of ‘Mesto duhov’. During this song, Cvjetićanin played the acoustic guitar, Guštin finally took off the sunglasses he had been wearing the entire night so far (but kept on his little tiara), and someone in the crowd was blowing bubbles while everyone else was waving their arms along to the rhythm. As Cvjetićanin was about to announce the next song, he noticed that “someone has a letter”. As it was meant for Nace Jordan, Cvjetićanin passed it along to him, and Jordan folded it into his breastpocket. The band continued ‘Ako toga više neće biti’ and ‘Vse kar vem’, before Cvjetićanin stated that there were many friends and people who help them out in the audience tonight, including their Discord moderator. Specifically for them, the band played their favourite song ‘Vem da gres’, which isn’t normally part of the setlist.
Joker Out continued with ‘Ne bi smel’ and ‘Sunny Side of London’. Before playing the latter, Cvjetićanin said that people always look at him with disgust when the chorus hits, because it asks for the audience to scream as loud as they can. He warned people to plug their ears, because otherwise they all feel bad for those lowkey going deaf – except Kris Guštin, “he is just slaying there”. It was then, finally, time for the song that “probably made 99,9% of the people tonight show up”, ‘Carpe Diem’. Cvjetićanin said he was grateful that people took the time not only to listen to this 3-minute song, but also to the rest of the band’s catalogue. The entire audience loudly sang along to the Slovenian lyrics the entire show, but especially during this song. The band, who had been traveling the entire day to get from London to Tilburg, was extremely energetic, but it was now time to slow things down a little with ‘Bluza’. The audience held up flashlights to accompany the beautiful atmosphere.
After playing ‘Šta bih ja’, it was time for the famous ‘Umazane misli’ karaoke party. While the band performed the first part of the song on stage, the rest was performed in the crowd: fans were allowed to hold up signs stating they wanted to sing the song, either in Slovenian or in their own language. People were singing in Polish, Dutch, and even Twents – the dialect of Twente, which is not at all near Tilburg. Cvjetićanin was walking amongst the crowd, handing the microphone to anyone who wanted to sing. Back on the stage, it was time for the encore which consisted of ‘Novi Val’. The entire band stood at the front of the stage together while both fans as well as the band themselves were blowing bubbles. As they had never left the stage, this wasn’t really an actual encore – that didn’t happen until a few minutes later, when Guštin said in Dutch “We doen nog één liedje. Dit is onze nieuwe single ‘Supersonic’!” (transl. “We’ll play one more song. This is our new single ‘Supersonic’!”). The band and the crowd went wild one last time before it was unfortunately time for the show to come to an end.
