The SB Girls concert at Etihad Arena in Abu Dhabi was full of nostalgia, and the surprise was who showed up for it. It wasn’t only the trentahin and kwarentahin in the crowd—the younger set came just as prepared, from the outfits to the Spaghetti moves down to lyrics they had no business knowing by heart but did. The group did not disappoint an arena packed with Filipino fans who traveled in from across the Emirates. Thousands became part of a first: the SB Girls are the first Filipino act to headline Etihad Arena, and the group looked genuinely caught off guard when the venue handed them a plaque of recognition.
From the moment they came out at 8:30pm, the energy never dipped. In bright, colorful costumes, they worked a crowd that spanned generations—proof of a career that has outlasted nearly every trend it started alongside.
The SB Girls built the blueprint before P-pop had a name. Formed in November 1999 by choreographer Joy Cancio, they began as backup dancers on Eat Bulaga! and grew into one of the best-selling girl groups in the Philippines and Asia through the 2000s. Long before BINI, MNL48, or the current P-pop wave, they had already shown that a Filipina dance group could carry albums, television, and film at once—which is why they are now credited among the pioneers who laid P-pop’s foundation.
Their songs are permanent fixtures at Filipino gatherings. “Spaghetti Song,” “Bakit Papa,” “Halukay Ube,” “Sumayaw Sumunod,” and “Di Ko Na Mapipigilan” were never just hits—they became fiesta and party staples that one generation of kids after another grew up mimicking, capped by the group’s signature “Get, get aww!” The songs aged into nostalgia, and the nostalgia keeps getting handed down.
Part of that staying power is the choreography itself: simple, communal, and easy to repeat. The appeal was never technical difficulty—it was that anyone at a gathering could jump in. That low barrier is exactly why the dances survive, moving from noontime television to weddings and now to phone screens.
The group also found the platform that reaches the youngest audiences. Rather than fading after their television peak, the members became fixtures on TikTok, filming dance clips together that reintroduced their catalog to viewers who weren’t alive when the hits first landed. “Di Ko Na Mapipigilan” returned as a viral hit largely through that route.
The lineup keeps regenerating while the identity holds. Across more than 25 years the group has cycled through dozens of members—with Rochelle Pangilinan long regarded as the anchor—and now continues as SB New Gen, also billed as SB Girls, under Viva Records. New faces, same dance-first character, which is how the name keeps getting passed to a new generation instead of retiring with the original one.
The biggest surprise of the night came when the group announced a return to the UAE on December 19, 2026, this time in Dubai—the Dubai leg fans had been waiting for after organizers merged the earlier dates into the single Abu Dhabi show.
The most emotional stretch came when they performed the theme from Daisy Siete, the long-running GMA Network afternoon drama series they topbilled from 2003 to 2010. For much of the crowd it unlocked a shared childhood, the Millennials and Gen Z who grew up on those siesta-hour episodes. The series ran an improbable 26 seasons over nearly seven years, and hearing its theme again in an Abu Dhabi arena landed harder than anyone expected.
If there was a complaint, it was a small one: some fans kept waiting for “Halukay Ube,” which never came. Even so, the SB Girls—dancers and singers both—cleared the bar the crowd set for them, and then some.
