M2M in Singapore: Grown voices, same heart and a whole lot of reminiscing (2025)

Don't Say You Love Me, the debut single from Norwegian pop duo M2M, was released the year that my parents got divorced. It was also the year I discovered what people mean when they say music “transports” you to another time and place.

Where I was transported, my big feelings were purely understood by the people on CD covers. Don’t Say You Love Me,a global hit after it featured in the first Pokemon movie, quickly became one of the songs I made the soundtrack of my new life. And M2M’s Marion Raven and Marit Larsen, unabashedly cool about their big feelings, became role models for my new self.

A year later, the song was included in their first album Shades Of Purple, a multi-platinum success, which I immediately snapped up from CD Rama. I listened to it obsessively in my bedroom every day after school, poring through the lyric booklet until it fell apart at the seams.

Apparently, this was not a unique experience. After Raven and Larsen announced their reunion and The Better Endings Tour 2025, it awoke many core memories from fellow millennial fans about how M2M's brief but pivotal presence in pop culture shaped our youth.

Since the tour began in Jakarta in late April, I'd also read many dramatic proclamations from fans that seeing the duo reunited on stage “healed their inner child”.

And I finally understood why during their concert at The Star Theatre on Monday evening (May 12) – the band's final stop on the Asia leg of the comeback tour.

The 18-song setlist, conveniently shared with fans on M2M’s official Spotify account before the tour, kicked off with The Day You Went Away – a fitting introduction after Raven and Larsen disbanded in 2002, when their second album The Big Room didn’t perform well enough.

They went their separate ways for 22 years without speaking, untila chance meeting at a cafe in Osloin 2024 made them decide M2M wasn’t done writing their final chapter.

Although their songs had been remixed slightly for the tour, their melodies were still dreamy and lilting – the sound of lazy afternoons spent listening to music and escaping from the world.

Popular hits from both albums, such as Don’t Mess With My Love, Everything You Do, Mirror Mirror and Pretty Boy, instantly got the crowd singing along like we were back in our bedrooms in 2000, muscle memory taking over, not once missing a single beat or lyric.

But while the songs stayed the same, their meanings had evolved over time. When Raven was writing Pretty Boy, the song was about the universal teenage experience of wanting to be chosen by a crush. Revisiting the song now in her 40s, she told the audience, it became about her one-and-a-half-year-old son.

The confessional intimacy that made M2M popular back in the day was now more defined and nuanced as well, just like their voices. Two decades of life experience since they last sang together had added layers to their signature breathy vocals, making it fuller and more mature – the sound of teenage girls turned grown women who had found a way to meld past with future.

Their musical growth also showed in the decision to intersperse M2M songs with eight from their solo careers, such as Here I Am and Driving from Raven, and Under The Surface and If A Song Could Get Me You from Larsen, including a nod to artistes who'd inspired them.

Before Raven launched into It's All Coming Back To Me Now in her rendition of the Celine Dion classic that she'd recorded with Meat Loaf, she quipped to the audience that while we were listening to M2M in our bedrooms, she was listening to Celine Dion.

I suspect some may have expected a night filled solely with M2M karaoke singalongs, but I felt the inclusion of their solo material underscored the true spirit of their comeback.It was never meant to be a pure nostalgia trip.

Instead, I saw it as a broader reminder to a generation on the cusp of mid-life to honour the defining moments that shaped us, without being tethered to the shadow of youth.

And 26 years after Don't Say You Love Me first introduced M2M to the world, it closed The Better Endings Tour 2025 – reintroducing them to the same generation.

As Raven, Larsen and their band brought down the house with the final encore, I looked at my fellow millennials around me, each singing and dancing with the unmistakable abandon of someone telling their younger self that life worked out in the end.

Of all 90s and 2000s bands to make a comeback, trust the OG confessional singer-songwriters to do it the only way they knew their fans needed. Like their emotionally resonant songs once upon a time, a generation's two elder sisters now remind us a better ending isn't about reliving or rewriting the past.

It is knowing we get to choose how the next chapter unfolds.