The Weeknd07.15.25
Vancouver, BC
The Weeknd is pretty easily my favourite artist of all time. It feels hyperbolic to say that, but I know that no other artist will have the opportunity to catch me in my formative years and then be there every step of my way into adulthood. That can really only happen once in a lifetime, and for me it was The Weeknd.
Beauty Behind the Madness was the high school album, catching up with everything he had done on Kiss Land and Trilogy on bus rides to school.
Starboy was the university freshman album, and what came with it was actually my first concert ever, when The Weeknd rolled into Ottawa with the Starboy tour.
After Hours dropped right at the dawn of the pandemic, while I was finishing up university, and was the soundtrack to a time when the real world was paused just long enough for me to fall in love with great storytelling — not just in music, but in film and television as well, and the cinematic world-building The Weeknd managed to pull off with that album was nothing short of foundational for me.
Dawn FM came about just a month after I had moved out from home for the first time, and later that year I would finally get to see him live once again, supersized to the scale of the SkyDome in his native Toronto for the After Hours Til Dawn tour. A show that came with an insane amount of anticipation, after the After Hours tour was reinvented and postponed due to the pandemic, plus the failed outing earlier in the year where the nationwide Rogers outage caused a last minute cancellation of the show. While that show was legendary, I had a palpable hunger for more, which led me on a trek to London to see him at the iconic Wembley Stadium the following year.
And now I find myself in Vancouver, Hurry Up Tomorrow providing the soundtrack to my time in this city, with the opportunity to see him not once, but twice, on back-to-back nights at BC Place. The lore here is insane — every time The Weeknd has managed to do it bigger and better, I seem to find a way to follow suit.
Anyways, this tour is still billed as the After Hours Til Dawn tour, in what feels like a victory lap of sorts for what The Weeknd has deemed to be a second trilogy with After Hours, Dawn FM, and now Hurry Up Tomorrow. Amidst speculation that this might be his last go of it as The Weeknd, it truly did feel like a celebration of everything he has accomplished from 2011 to 2025. The gleaming cityscape that loomed large over the stage on previous legs of the tour has crumbled to gold plated ruins, making way for a massive screen wih ultra high-definition live visuals, tracking his movements across the sprawling stages.
The setlist has been tweaked to make room for cuts from Hurry Up Tomorrow — if I had to have picked some tracks to be cut, I would have picked the same ones, which was a run of tracks he had only collaborated on, like Drake's "Crew Love", Future's "Low Life", and Ty Dolla $ign's "Or Nah". Just about every hit you could think of was played. The transition from "Baptized in Fear" to "Open Hearts" absolutely popped live, coming to life as lasers crossed all over the stadium. "Out of Time" remains a special moment for the fans, and marks the start of the most intimate section of the show, when he pours his heart into more sentimental tracks like "Die For You" and "Call Out My Name". And with "Less Than Zero", he sang to the crowd, "I'll always be less than zero... but never when I'm in Vancouver.". Pure poetry.
I really don't think there is much room for improvement on the setlist here — while I would have loved to hear deeper pop cuts like "Secrets" or "In Your Eyes", I understand that the set has to be accessible to casual fans. Leaving the title track off of Hurry Up Tomorrow is a bit curious to me, given its prominence in the film that accompanied the album. "Hardest to Love" remains a white whale for me, as he has never played it at any of his shows I have attended, and I think he has only played it once overall, during the one-night-only special that took place in São Paulo in late 2024.
With these strategic omissions from his previous sets, and a longer set overall, he managed to fit in a remarkable 39 songs over two hours and change. It would have been 40 tracks, based on previous shows on this leg of the tour, but Playboi Carti did not make it over the border to open this show, where he normally appears during The Weeknd's set to perform "Timeless" and "Rather Lie". The Weeknd still touched on "Timeless" here, but skipped "Rather Lie" in its entirety. While I like some of Carti's music, especially the Die Lit era, I don't think we missed out on much here, at least from what I've heard about his tendency to mail it in for live performances.
In general, I'm amazed at the enduring appeal of The Weeknd's music, how he has managed to stay relevant to younger and older fans alike, through all of his artistic reinventions. At the core of it, he has always been a storyteller, and I think that's what has really captivated those who are willing to listen, beyond the radio hits. He is a bona fide pop star, but it's the way he has been able to broadcast his vision cinematically, in a way that feels deeply faithful and authentic to himself and the works he has drawn from, that makes him such a singularity at the zeitgeist of popular music. More to come for night two!
