on the dot Sunday, the seven members of BTS appeared onstage at SoFi Stadium, each dressed in white to open the sold-out second show of the K-pop group’s four-night stand in Inglewood with an elaborate jail-break sequence set to the band’s song “On.”.

The simple read in this case is that the group was celebrating the end(-ish) of strict pandemic safety measures: “BTS Permission to Dance On Stage — LA,” as Sunday’s show was officially billed, marks its long-awaited return to live audiences after more than a year and a half away.

In an old-school news conference before the performance, the band’s leader, RM, said that seeing the stadium filled with people the night before “got me emotional beyond words.” His bandmate J-Hope added that he hoped the show would enable fans to “release some of the sadness and depressing thoughts” of the COVID-19 era?

This month, the band was named artist of the year at the American Music Awards — a flimsy appellation, but still — and earned its second nomination for a more respectable Grammy (though some would argue the group deserved more than one nod).

Yet BTS still lives by the customs of the highly regimented K-pop industry, which positions its superstars as ambassadors of South Korean culture; last year, the country’s government even revised a law permitting top K-pop artists to postpone their required military service so they might continue spreading South Korea’s soft power around the world (as BTS did in September with a visit to the United Nations).

Reviewers weren’t invited to the group’s SoFi opener on Saturday presumably to ensure that the members — the others are Jungkook, Jin, Suga, Jimin and V — had an opportunity to regain their footing after such a long break.

The band’s minders needn’t have worried: To the delight of the young, racially diverse crowd — Asian, Latino, Black, white fans — Sunday’s show was polished as though BTS had been performing every night for weeks.

For the folky “Life Goes On,” whose Korean lyrics ponder the loneliness of the pandemic era, the band members flopped around on a giant bed and an oversize sofa; for “Telepathy,” they boarded motorized platforms that traveled the perimeter of the stadium’s floor to get closer to the fans they call Army.

Throughout the show, fans waved pricey Bluetooth-enabled light sticks — the ones designed for BTS are called Army Bombs — that blinked in time to the music.