It could be that the end of the world will catch us all dancing in a ruined city, brought together by the hedonistic cult of the senses, light, fire and flesh in a ceremony presided over by a stylized robot with Abel Tesfaye as master of ceremonies. While the thermometers function as messiahs of the climate apocalypse, last Thursday more than 50,000 people, young people in their 20s and 30s, gathered at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona to experience The Weeknd’s show, where he presented his last two works, prepared with the themes that have taken him to all the discos between the rhythm and the darkness.
Another catastrophe, the pandemic, truncated the Canadian artist’s plans to present the album After hours, released in February 2020. The tour was postponed until 2022, during which Tesfaye released Dawn FM with his usual eighties sound accessible to all audiences. The two works form the After hours til dawn tour, around thirty songs that review his entire career, compressed to make them fit in the two hours of the concert with the varnish that confers the lead’s stilted voice, compared by its tone and its twists to that of Michael Jackson.
There are no big screens this time on stage, a metropolis of shiny metal made up of destroyed buildings including the Chrysler skyscraper in New York or London’s St Paul’s Cathedral. The set drew a dystopia on which the three musicians (drums, keyboard and guitar) settled and which gave way to a long catwalk that practically reached the other end of the stadium. A space topped by a huge moon and, between either side of the end, the powerful presence of an immense metallic robot with female forms with its arms thrown back, as if it was about to jump into the sky. It was on this space that Tesfaye moved during most of the concert, and addressed the audience on both sides while dozens of lights and lasers that touched the clouds conferred vertical volumes of color, from red to blue, from green to yellow, so that they turned the Olímpíc into an immense ballroom that gained strength as the night wore on.
About thirty vestals appeared on the catwalk at 9.30 pm to begin the ritual. Dressed completely in white, their faces covered, they began a dance under the big moon while on the opposite side The Weeknd made his appearance over the ruined city also dressed in white, his face covered by a metal mask that he did not remove until mid-concert. The cheers of the audience – all the stands followed in unison – mixed with the rhythm of Take my breath and offered their most disco vein in an initial crescendo that hit the ceiling with Can’t feel my face, so that they remembered why this 33-year-old son of Ethiopian immigrants has become the guest of all parties. “Barcelona, ??I missed you so much”, he said.
Tefaye had fans cheering as he belted out slow, dark tracks, and added rap beats, such as Kayne West’s cover of Hurricane. Or he played funk to get the audience up, who expressed their joy with each hit, whether it was The Hills (which literally set a stage in hellish red on fire) Starboy, I feel it Coming or Call out my name, performed amidst smoke, fire and the light of luminous bracelets, which were lit up last night, in tracks like Lost in the fire or Out of time, tracks all chanted by a dedicated audience while hooded dancers danced like priestesses Greeks with their clothes reflecting the colors that flooded the Stadium.
Colors that dyed the entire stage like a large canvas while the music covered the entire career of this son of Ethiopian immigrants, with the version of Crew Love, by Drake, House of balloons or the dark and carnal Kiss land, a reminder of his addictions that began at the age of 11 with marijuana. Rap and R
