If the symbolic has no weight, just ask The Weeknd. The Canadian has prepared a whole macro ritual to say goodbye to his alias. Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (Scarborough, 1990) has been on the After Hours til Dawn Tour for four years, since 2022, pretending to die in music videos and threatening to step away from the stage name that brought him fame. A tour that will end next November in Malaysia. On the peninsula, he has a hat-trick of consecutive dates in Madrid and yesterday he stepped onto the Lluís Companys stadium in Barcelona, with a set design reminiscent of Toronto’s Gotham City, the city where he learned the night, and a very Kubrickian staging, surrounded by dancers who seem to have come out of Eyes Wide Shut.
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Although cinema has been especially difficult for him, his series The Idol (2023) was canceled by HBO after the first season, and the thriller Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025) passed without fanfare, based on a true story of when he lost his voice during a concert at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. However, live performance is his best format and his six studio albums, plus the trilogy of mixtapes, have made him the most listened-to singer in the world. The concert is a whole journey, with a cyclical arc. The setlist includes the greatest hits from his last trilogy: After Hours (2020), Dawn FM (2022), and Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025). He has structured it in such a way that it replicates the perspective of “player gonna play.” Players play, but they are also going to be played. It starts with songs where he is the unfaithful one, like “After Hours” or “Starboy,” continues searching for his lover – “How Do I Make You Love Me?” – and approaches the end being the victim of deceit with “Creepin’,” the legendary version of Mario Winans’ “I Don’t Wanna Know.”
At the center of the stage, in the shape of a cross, an immense, impassive, golden female figure confronts him, who, small, becomes immense through the screens. Sometimes it seems like he is playing puppeteer with the sculpture, other times she magnifies and shrinks him. The narrative is clear. If we didn’t know about his troubled romances with Bella Hadid and Selena Gomez, it would seem like a fictional story. An expert in sublimating his life through art, he sings in an impressive falsetto about behaviors that are more than dark, toxic. But beyond love, there are subplots. Let’s remember that The Weeknd, who rose to fame from anonymity, was the son of Ethiopian immigrants who arrived in the 80s to a Canada as dystopian as it is now. He dropped out of school one weekend and never returned – hence his heteronym – and became famous patrolling the streets.
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Apparently romantic songs like “Can’t Feel My Face” talk about cocaine, in the hit from his beginnings, “House of Balloons” samples “Happy House” by Siouxsie and The Banshees, in a statement that there is no happy home. When during the first third of the concert he wears a mask, which has been identified as a tribute to his late idol MF Doom, it could also be related to Batman or Doctor Doom. It will never be known if he was a hero or villain, but the dichotomy does not stop the energy of this dynamo known as The Weeknd, often mistaken for a band. He is, without a doubt, a multiple artist and this is a skill that never fails when embodying characters and setting them on fire live. Never has a journey from aggressor to victim sounded so good.