The Weeknd Explores Synth-Pop and R&B at SoFi Stadium: Concert Review

The Weeknd is good at many things, and math might be one of them. He’s doing four shows at SoFi Stadium this week as part of the final leg of his three-year-old “After Hours Til Dawn” tour and, looking at the seating charts, you’d have to say that filling 200,000 seats across those dates proved to be exactly the right goal. The shows are all either sold out or within a handful of seats of that, yet get-in-the-door resale prices aren’t so crazy that it seems like he ought to have gilded the lily by adding another. In an age where it’s suddenly clear a lot of artists overestimate how many nights they should book in one ballpark (even one being too many, in some cases), the Weeknd and his team nailed just how many hundreds of thousands of tickets they could easily sell. That, in itself, is an artform.

So, is there anything he’s not great at? Well, yes: making movies (so far). But returning to the scene where concert footage for his recent film “Hurry Up Tomorrow” was shot didn’t dredge up too much PTSD for too many people (since even his fans seemed to know to skip it). And so he came back to SoFo seeming fairly invulnerable, a rare place for even the highest-pantheon pop superstars to find themselves these days. You may be able to find an Achilles heel for him somewhere off the concert stage, but when it comes to touring, it’s not easy to see anywhere he’s making an obvious misstep. The first night of his four-night stand at SoFi Thursday night was predicated on the idea that the Weeknd has the vocal skills and force of personality to pull off what essentially amounts to a one-man show for 135 minutes. As with the ticketing thing, this turns out to have been a safe assumption.

There are many Abels in the back catalog that he is mining for this 41-song show. There is the Weeknd who has self-consciously draggy stretches of material where he sings about death and self-degradation, with all the levity of a Cure album; there is the callous and cocksure “Starboy” who can out-braggadocio any hip-hop star; there is the people-pleasing, woman-satisfying R&B singer who is no Starboy, just your sweet lover boy; and there’s the synth-pop revivalist who can get 50,000 people to jump in unison to tunes that sound carefree, even if they might be a little depressive under the surface. All of these Tesfayes get a good test drive during his current show, sometimes paired off into groupings that almost make it seem like there’s a narrative arc to the show, or at least some amount of thought about how to not make it all feel like a random jumble.

At the very start of the show, we get a good, daunting dose of Prog-Rock Abel. A solid 20 minutes goes gloomily by at the outset where the Weeknd and his two dozen dancers are have their faces obscured by masks. (His will come off, of course, but theirs never do.) They have glowing orbs for eyes, against set design that shows a wrecked city full of scorched and toppled skyscrapers, as the star sings the foreboding “The Abyss,” which wonders aloud why personal lives should go on if the world is going to end. The masked dancers — who aren’t really doing any dancing at this point — are wearing crimson robes, while the Weeknd has a bejeweled black one. Up close, the glittery robe was revealed to not be a show-biz smock but a regal Ethiopian kaba. Still, the whole spooky “Eyes Wide Shut” vibe was thick enough that when the Weeknd later sang the line “I sacrificed your love,” it seemed for a second like it might not just have been a figure of speech.

But if it resembled a Sleep Token gig for a little bit, that wouldn’t last. Finally, Tesfaye reached up to remove his mask,very, very slowly, revealing not a scowl but with a big, shit-eating grin on his face. And if you’d started to get just a little put off by the initial pretentiousness of it all, it was kind of endearing, to catch the first unadorned glimpse of a kid who just wants to put on a good show. Over the next couple of hours, he proved an engaging and downright solicitous host. The production design might have set him within a post-apocalyptic landscape, but this was going to be a friendly, feel-good dystopia after all.

HIs engagement, though, was with the audience, not anyone else on stage. Those dancers not only never get to take their masks off, but they don’t do much dancing, either, or even come back very much. As far as the musicians went, sometimes a few players do show themselves on the main stage — with some very thunderous drumming happening — while other times it’s a pre-recorded trap beat. The only time a musician ever appeared on the big screens was a single shot of Mike Dean, the producer who opened the show with an instrumental set, letting loose with some arpeggios on an old-school synthesizer. In a way, this isn’t surprising; the Weeknd did just release a two-hour movie in which there are only two other characters. Two hours and 15 minutes is a long time, in the scheme of a concert, to not really truly share the stage with any members of the hired help — it’s taking solo act to the extreme.

That said, does the audience need to have anyone other than Tesfaye to lock in with or look at? It’s a debatable point. There was one shared stretch Wednesday night, when opening act Playboi Carter came out to collude on a couple of boys’-night-out numbers, “Timeless” and “Never Lie.” (Carter spent his entire set demanding the audience “make some motherfucking noise,” and that’s contagious, because as soon as he came out during the headlining performance, the Weeknd infectiously couldn’t stop saying it either.) And when it came to the actual audience, the Weeknd made sure to get some personal time in, stepping down from the B-stage and going up to the rail at one point to lead some of his ecstatic female fans in a charming group-sing of the “Dawn FM” track “Out of Time.” (Fortunately he got right back on stage before there were any awkward moments about whether to have them sing about “the heat between your legs” in the next song, “I Feel It Coming.”)

Staging-wise, this is a tour that resists the modern superstar temptation to make each song into its own separate production number, a la Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Halsey, et al. There were no costume changes for the Weeknd, and once you saw the stage, you pretty much had the lay of the land for the rest of the night. Very gigantic at the center of the floor was a leaning but impressively anchored female robot sculpture; whether this was meant to be a tribute to “Metropolis” or a representation of the Weeknd’s own golden calf was anyone’s guess. In any case, the huge woman-bot served as his north star for the night, as he often returned to its base and circled around it, looking up at her in romance or fear or awe. The ramps were configured as a giant cross, with the furthest tip reaching all the way to the loge seats on the far end of the floor. (Tesfaye often stopped his pacing to outstretch his arms, as one does on a cross.) The left and right extensions of the platforms each had a series of circular tubes, which didn’t add up to much with the naked eye, but looked great on the big screen when the Weeknd would be caught by the big screen in an extended take, standing in the middle of them and facing a static camera. (Alexander Wessely is the tour’s very capable visual creative director.)

And was there pyro? Serious pyro, to the point where a gasoline or propane shortage in Los Angeles suddenly seemed like an actual possibility. “Are you warmed up yet?” the Weeknd would occasionally ask the crowd, and it wasn’t clear if he was deliberately or inadvertently making a joke about the towers of flame along each ramp and their immediate effect on the temperature in the floor seats.

The m.o. for using the thrust staging is similar to what Swift or anyone else with that much stadium real estate does nowadays: do the first part of the show welded to the main stage, then tease the audience by inserting yourself into it just a little at a time on those ramps, and then finally taking full advantage at about the halfway point. The Weeknd didn’t often return to the main stage after he finally ditched it, with increasingly plentiful visits to the far, far distant B-stage, which is where much of the last and best parts of the evening transpired.

Genre-wise, there’s a lot of what the Weeknd does that it’s hard to qualify as R&B, given how much he’s relying on the pomp and circumstance of other pop and rock traditions. But for about the third quarter of the concert, it was practically nothing but — with Tesfaye offering a potent reminder of why he’s often been compared not just to Michael Jackson but to some of the more silken-voiced vocalists of yore. There were those other numbers earlier in the concert that had the more caddish or depressed lyrics, in which his angelic voice stands as ironic contrast to the demons in his words. But when he gets to numbers like “Out of Time,” “Die for You” or “Call Out My Name,” and lets himself go fully romantic (thwarted or otherwise), nobody does that supple earnestness any better. And it’s a wonder to behold how he works the room — the full house that is SoFi Stadium, of course, but also the smaller bedroom of fans that he is immediately playing to there on the south end of the field.

And then he pivoted again for the last part of the show, which was a pure synth-pop joy bomb with numbers like “Save Your Tears,” “Less Than Zero” and obviously “Blinding Lights.” Suddenly, SoFi Stadium was playing host to an OMD concert, more or less, and the R&B romanticism of the previous stretch has been replaced by New Romanticism.

These bouncy songs aren’t his most ambitious songs, just some of his most fun ones. It’s a show that starts with portent and then throws brooding to the wind, getting better and giddier as it goes along with those distinct stylistic turns. Thinking back on the show’s nearly sinister, ritualistic, depressive-ideation beginning as you consider its carefree last act, you may wonder if the Weeknd’s exhortations to the crowd are really behavior becoming of a Druid, but that’s OK.