Abel Tesfaye's Soon-To-Be Retired Persona Did Over 40 Songs of Pop Perfection

On stage inside a sold-out AT&T Stadium, a cityscape is in decay. Between massive lighting rigs, gear for a band and more lasers than Star Wars, a once-powerful city skyline has turned to rubble, leaving only its ruins to host Abel Tesfaye’s curtain call as The Weeknd.

It’s the first of a two-night Dallas stop on the pop megastar’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour, set to serve as the retirement of The Weeknd persona for Tesfaye, as well as the culmination of the After Hours - Dawn FM - Hurry Up Tomorrow album trilogy.

Tesfaye, 35, certainly has a feel for the dramatic. He’s staging this elaborate farewell tour just for the moniker, and says he plans to continue making music under his given name. This tour and new album, Hurry Up Tomorrow, also came with a companion movie of the same name, in which Tesfaye plays himself in a sweat-soaked nightmare alongside Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan. The film was a critical and commercial flop, but we appreciated the ambition of taking such a huge swing at the pop culture fences.

For this tour, Tesfaye brought along Mike Dean and Playboi Carti as openers. The former produced Hurry Up Tomorrow, and the latter was featured on one of its standout tracks, “Timeless.”

Dean’s opener was more of a mellow DJ set, before an anarchic appearance from Playboi Carti and his entourage that captivated the stadium as quickly as it exited it. In a blink-and-you-miss-it five-song setlist, Carti thrashed and squealed around the massive stage for a tight 15 minutes, screaming alongside “EVIL J0RDAN” and “LIKE WEEZY,” two cuts from his latest release, I Am Music. The entire crowd was given seats for this show, which felt like the only thing preventing chaos from breaking out on the floor when he was on stage.

It’s easy to poke fun at Carti’s music (right, “FE!N” gets better after they shout it for the 38th time in a row), but that would be missing the point. There’s a sort of out-of-body experience you can feel when you watch him and his entourage of black-leather-clad dancers, hype men and a lone guitarist, and it’s that you’re watching something that is on the absolute forefront of the contemporary.

This kind of stadium rage rap, perfected in Travis Scott's maximalist style, just didn’t exist 10 years ago. It is new and innovative and has clearly tapped into the violence-of-youth expression of today’s teenagers. He sends this crowd into a frenzy, assuring us that this new sound and style of popular music isn't going anywhere.

At around 9 p.m., the lights went down as a couple of dozen dancers adorned in red drapes flanked the front of the stage. We first heard his voice, The Weeknd’s unmistakable falsetto singing his part of “The Abyss,” a new song from Hurry Up Tomorrow featuring Lana Del Rey. He emerged from behind his troupe of dancers wearing a sparkly black robe and a metal mask with glowing eyes, which he performed in for the first few songs. In the center of the stadium, an enormous metal colossus with similarly glowing eyes fixed its gaze on him and rotated around the stadium following in whatever direction he was performing.

“Wake Me Up” was next, giving way to a sprawling 41-song setlist that focused primarily on the After Hours trilogy, but included a number of older hits in The Weeknd’s version of a Taylor Swift Eras Tour.

Within the setlist, you could hear and feel Tesfaye’s evolution as a performer. As the arrangements of his newer mega pop songs like “Take My Breath” or “Heartless” boomed through the stadium, we were reminded of the Weeknd we used to know — the quiet, bedroom-eyed singer who produced songs like “Kiss Land” in 2013.

These days, he’s traded the hedonism for heroism, transforming his music and his performance into one of the most gigantic pop institutions you’ll ever see. Last night’s career-spanning set cemented him as a stadium superhero and one of the defining performers of this century.

It’s not just the theatrics; Tesfaye’s voice was perfect, almost indistinguishable live from recorded. The show lasted about two and a half hours with no break, and we didn’t even notice a sip of water. His training regimen must be ridiculous, and it's working like magic.

"The Hills" was one of the night's most fun sing-alongs, complete with a scorched-earth pyro that singed our faces. On "Blinding Lights," the entire stadium turned into one big pent-up dance party, since the song was first released on After Hours during COVID.

Tesfaye has a staggering amount of hits, and we wouldn't bet against him producing a whole new wave of classics soon, whether under his own name or The Weeknd. As a live performer, this is about as close as you can get to pop music perfection. Trust us, this is one of the best pop tours we've ever seen.

More photos from Wednesday's show: