If anyone in this room hasn’t heard The Weeknd, stop reading this right now and, at least, listen to Blinding Lights. It currently sits at 5,560,743,185 streams, the most-streamed song in Spotify history. But this interstellar mega-hit isn’t a stroke of luck for Abel Makkonen Tesfaye: Starboy, Die For You and Save Your Tears also crack the top hundred most-streamed tracks of all time. There’s no rival. Because, to give you an idea, the race for the planet’s most-streamed artist has been between these three for nearly five years: Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and The Weeknd.
Okay, that introduction was superfluous. It’s clear that The Weeknd sounds familiar to you. And you probably also know that his monumental tour, After Hours til Dawn, has been spinning around the world for four years: it began on July 14, 2022 in Philadelphia and, after stops in Madrid on August 28–30 (Riyadh Air Metropolitano) and Barcelona on September 1 (Estadi Olímpic) – tickets are still on sale –, is slated to conclude on November 5 in Kuala Lumpur. In 2025 it closed as one of the tours with the highest attendance in history and among the highest-grossing of all time, with no less than $1.004 trillion in revenue across 153 concerts.
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What will you see if you go? Hard to explain without spoilers, beyond the fact that Playboi Carti will be at all four of Spain’s shows as a guest artist. The Weeknd’s creative director, La Mar Taylor, Abel’s childhood friend and right hand, described this tour to Variety as “a journey through a cosmic catastrophe that has exploded and ravages the Earth. The devastation is widespread and, very likely, will continue until dawn.” Boom.
Despite all these numbers, all this grandeur, Abel Makkonen Tesfaye (Toronto, 1990) is, one could say, small. Of stature (1.73 m) and equally modest in intent, with songs that seem as if he wrote them just for you. His lyricism and melancholy, sometimes painful, with a strong presence of rhythm and blues but also of pop and dance, dance between lines of epic tragedy and a countless array of influences he does not hide, such as Prince and Michael Jackson, as well as Cocteau Twins and his beloved Daft Punk. He has often confessed that Dirty Diana made him become a singer. Understandable.
