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The Weeknd doesn’t do anything by half, and for his “One Night Only” concert Saturday night at MorumBIS Stadium in Sao Paulo, Brazil, he rose to the moment with cameos from Anitta and Playboi Carti, a giant stage backlit with an enormous video screen that must have been 100 feet tall, dozens of (of course) blinding lights, a YouTube global livestream of the show, and the premieres of several new songs that are presumably from his forthcoming album, “Hurry Up Tomorrow.”
The evening’s show was basically an evolution of the “After Hours Til Dawn” concert he brought to North America in 2022 and, in an updated form, to Europe last year: a huge, almost airport runway-like illuminated walkway extending from one end of the stadium floor to another, but with a a giant, temple-like two-story building in the middle, and an illuminated, cross-shaped stage at the opposite end of the walkway from the video screen.
The battery of shrouded female dancers remained from the earlier phases of the tour, as did the stadium-filling light show and its state of the art lightshow, which flashed projected mostly white and red lights from multiple elevated areas of the stadium as well as the stage and runway. He made full use of the towering video screen, filling it with everything from clouds to a cityscape, waterfalls to explosions, giant cathedral-like windows and even a freakishly huge closeup of his own eye.
As dazzling and crowd-pleasing as the staging and effects were, the setlist was another matter: This was no hits extravaganza, but rather a kind of remix-style set focusing almost entirely on material from the “After Hours” trilogy, with a large number of songs from the 2023 album “Dawn.FM” and eight or nine from the new album — which very few people in the world had heard before this night — along with a Travis Scott and Playboi Carti song during the latter’s several-minute-long cameo. (The new song they performed together was apparently a new single produced by Pharrell Williams, teased online later in the night.) It was a bold move for an artist performing in from of 75,000-ish people and however many millions on the livestream.
Equally bold is the level of confidence it takes to fill a stage almost entirely by oneself. The Weeknd is not an elaborate dancer and he doesn’t do many costume changes — he spent this entire performance in a hooded black robe with elaborate embroidery — but lets his soaring, powerful voice, the songs and the show carry the night. He pumped up the crowd in nearly every song, with lots of his trademark “Hey!”s and many shout-outs to Sao Paulo, altering one lyric to ““I think I found my religion in Sao Paulo!” The audience sang along loudly through much of the show — for the songs they knew, anyway — and he led them in singalongs several times during the set.
Not surprisingly, Brazilian native Anitta got a huge roar from the crowd when she appeared, dancing atop the temple in a bright red gown to a new song apparently called “Sao Paulo.”
He cruised the show toward its finale with a sort of slow-jam R&B mini-set featuring “Out of Time” and “Is There Someone Else?” before leading into a big chunk of “After Hours” that included the live debut of the drum n’ bass-inflected “Hardest to Love” (he rode the song’s tricky rhythm without missing a beat), the ballad “Scared to Live” and finally “Save Your Tears,” before sailing through “Less Than Zero” and closing, naturally enough, with an explosive version of “Blinding Lights.”
The show ended just over 90 minutes after it began, but with a slightly anticlimactic finale that the audience expected to be an encore but instead was a fleet of illuminated drones flying over the stadium, creating first a sheet of lights, then blinking, and finally spelling out the title of the new album, “Hurry Up Tomorrow.”
Also on-brand for the Weeknd — who has given millions of dollars to charities over the past five years — he partnered with the U.N. World Food Programme to contribute funds from the show to the XO Humanitarian Fund, which supports the organization’s response to the global hunger crisis. $1 local equivalent from each ticket sold will go to this cause.
Big as Saturday’s concert was, it’s only the first show in the rollout for the new album — next month he’s touring Australia for the final leg of the “After Hours” tour, and what comes next remains to be seen.
Setlist (from setlist.fm)Fades to Black / Run Away (Unreleased song, live debut) Wake Me Up (Unreleased song, live debut) After Hours Too Late (Live debut; sings the line “It’s too late to save my soul” a few times) Take My Breath Sacrifice (Swedish House Mafia remix) How Do I Make You Love Me? Escape from LA (Sung over the outro of “How Do I Make You Love Me?”) Take Me Back to LA (Unreleased song) Dancing in the Flames (Unreleased song, live debut) Until I Bleed Out (Live debut; he sings only a few lines from the song before transitioning to the next song) FE!N (Travis Scott cover) (with Playboi Carti) Until I Bleed Out (with Playboi Carti) TIMELESS (Playboi Carti cover) (with Playboi Carti) (Unreleased song, live debut) São Paulo (with Anitta) (Unreleased song, live debut) Heartless Repeat After Me (Interlude) (Live debut; sung over the outro of ‘Heartless’) Let’s End It All (Unreleased song, live debut) Faith Alone Again Run Away (Unreleased song) Out of Time Is There Someone Else? Hardest to Love (Live debut) Scared to Live Save Your Tears Less Than Zero Blinding Lights Hurry Up Tomorrow (Unreleased song, live debut)
