This was stadium-sized, crowdpleasing pop music, but from his visuals to his backing tracks, it was clear that this was dark pop music. What makes Dawn FM one of his best albums since his early game-changing mixtapes is that it reminds you that The Weeknd is at his best when he’s at his darkest and weirdest, and the MetLife Stadium show reminded you of that too. The Super Bowl already cemented him as a motherfuckin’ starboy, but this was a triumphant reaffirmation. Even the deeper cuts held just as much power as the chart-topping hits (of which he has quite a few). The energy never lulled once throughout the night, and almost everyone that was in earshot of me was dancing and singing to every song. Chants of “ABEL” echoed through the stadium before his set - the crowd was already hyped up due to opening DJ sets from Mike Dean and Kaytranada - and the entire crowd rose to their feet the second the lights went down just before his 9PM start time. His setlist was impeccable, with every hit you could think of, choice cuts from his two newest albums, and classic collabs like “Crew Love” with Drake, “Low Life” with Future, and “Or Nah” with Ty Dolla $ign.įrom before he even took the stage, to the moment the lights came back up around 10:40 (no encore), the crowd was eating it all up. And for the most part, that was all you needed. There were no other musicians in sight, the dancers were more part of the overall aesthetic than stars of the show - Abel Tesfaye himself was the heart and soul of this concert. The Weeknd’s NYC-area stadium debut at MetLife Stadium on Saturday (7/16) was indeed a spectacle, complete with a stage backdrop mimicking a city skyline, a runway the length of the entire stadium floor with platforms in the middle and at the end, a big suspended moon above the end platform, pyro, a laser light show, ominous cloaked dancers, and light-up wristbands that were handed out to the crowd, but for the most part, The Weeknd commanded the sold-out stadium crowd off the strength of his voice and songs alone. On one hand, he has a greatest hits’ worth of crowd pleasing singles dating back over a decade, and on the other, he’s fresh off releasing some of the best music of his career.
The two new albums (which are reportedly part of a planned trilogy) are two of his best and most widely acclaimed yet, which makes this the perfect time for The Weeknd to enter the realm of stadium shows. The tour was originally supposed to happen in 2020, the same year The Weeknd released After Hours, but COVID got in the way, and in the time since then, he blessed the entire country with his arsenal of hits during the 2021 Super Bowl Halftime Show and released another new album, Dawn FM, hence this tour being named the After Hours til Dawn tour, as it supports both Dawn FM and After Hours. “I want to do something bigger and special for you which requires stadiums,” The Weeknd said when he upgraded his 2022 arena tour to his first-ever stadium tour.