Abel Tesfaye returns to Toronto to kill The Weeknd

Unlike Taylor Swift's meteorite-like crash landing in the sweaty city of Toronto, there were no friendship bead-wearing police horses at The Weeknd's first showing in the Six.

Instead, a more subdued air surrounded Rogers Centre as fans funnelled in: Low-key Starboy tracks warbling into the 30 C drippingly-wet air blanketing the stadium in the heart of The Weeknd's hometown.

But that doesn't mean a lack of excitement, despite the weather.

"God damn, it's hot," Canadian producer and DJ Kaytranada even exclaimed, towelling himself off onstage during a well-done if not earth-shattering opening.

That was as sweltering fans at the first of four sold-out nights in the 50,000-seat venue braved the heat in requisitely dark clothes to match the R&B superstar infamously dark music.

Just a day before, Mayor Olivia Chow dubbed the preceding days "The Weeknd weekend." That was because, she said, "Abel (The Weeknd) Tesfaye represents the best of our city." The Scarborough-raised artist also received a key to the city.

And it was all just before audience members, eager to experience what is often still described as a once-in-a-lifetime concert experience, were uncharacteristically chatty with journalists — throwing themselves into on-camera interviews instead of waiting for the insistent coaxing of harried producers.

"Everyone here, we are The Weeknd," a fan named Perry told CBC News. "He represents Canada."

But as Tesfaye took the stage, the seemingly incongruous mix of emotions instantly made sense. Decked in a black robe encrusted with glittering gold rhinestones and a golden half-mask, you could see he embodied that caustic mix of the charismatic and subdued that, for anyone else, would not fit in the same person at the same time.

As he has proven since releasing anonymous and unsettling dance-themed mixtapes in the 2010s all the way to this seemingly last tour under The Weeknd moniker, this is the space where Tesfaye thrives. While not retiring from music, he plans to no longer perform under the name he has become famous for.

Quickly barrelling through classic tracks The Abyss to Wake Me Up to After Hours, he was flanked by similarly masked, enrobed backup dancers — moving in unison around a slowly spinning golden statue of a giant, nude woman (imagine a female Oscars statuette, but with visible nipples).

They stood beneath large gold rings, in front of a mocked up golden skyline of a crumbling city. Even Tesfaye's microphone was gold, a particularly heavy-handed metaphor that, early on, he stumbled chaotically toward.

While roughly 30 women walked in sync around the statue and then behind to him, and as jets of fire shot up 20 feet into the air, Tesfaye held his hands up to the mic as if in prayer. None of them had to dance or even move much to earn the deafening applause that came next, as Tesfaye revealed the tiniest bit of his face, slightly peaking over the top of the mask.

"Well that's a warm welcome home, isn't it?" he asked to another roar.

It wasn't the last call out to his hometown. Later, he remarked the stadium is where he used to come to watch Blue Jays games "as a little baby," let out a long and extended "Toronto" in the middle of his track Sacrifice and managed to sneak both CN Tower and Rogers Centre references into São Paulo.

But the focus was the gold, the ceremony and the performative reverence of it. The effect is impressive if eerie. A consummate musical professional with four Grammys under his belt and more Junos than anyone but Anne Murray, Tesfaye knows how to set a scene.

He also knows how to sing, and — more than that — perform. He never failed to lead the tens of thousands of cheering attendants in song or just rapturous applause. It all gives the impression of some club-themed religious ceremony: A gigantic and enormously budgeted cultic worship service, except here the god is hedonism, sex and all the more outrageous scenes of Wolf of Wall Street.

Of course, this is by design — both why The Weeknd can define himself as a generational sex symbol without gyrating or even revealing a sliver of his body under baggy robes and ostensibly why he's choosing to leave the schtick behind after this tour. In his shows and music, he's playing a club kid, fame-obsessed semi-satirical character invented way back in his debut mixtape House of Balloons days — itself a mask, Tesfaye explained in a 2013 Reddit AMA, he chose in order to hide his name and, by extension, himself.

In person, it all comes together like a magic trick. At a Weeknd concert, we're both sick of materialism, and sick of being sick of it. We're letting go of every inhibition, forgetting love, revelling in sex and giving up on self-control. It's all a statement about nihilism, you see. Or maybe, it's not.

"It seems exorbitant when it all ends. A pointless, uncomfortable exercise from an artist who believes vanity means no stone of excess can be left unturned," music journalist Hanif Abdurraqib wrote of a 2013 Weeknd show in his book They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us.

"The Weeknd tells the same tale: It's never about love, but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires."

How much the separate entity of The Weeknd exists for Tesfaye to explore and mock his most self-destructive tendencies — instead of just revelling in them — isn't exactly clear. You would've been hard pressed to find any hints of displeasure from the seemingly ecstatic Tesfaye on Sunday. He hit hits old and new out of the park, and was grinning ear-to-ear as he held the microphone to nearly fainting fans, screaming out the ad libs of Out of Time.

Still, it's perhaps a strange message to brand, as Chow did, the best of the city — and a strange one to have drawn as many barely five-foot middle-schoolers as Sunday's all-ages show did.

At the same time, it's a theme that has offered diminishing returns. There was the 2022 Los Angeles concert in which Tesfaye infamously lost his voice due to stress. Then the ill-fated series The Idol, a Tesfaye-fronted series about the relentless pursuit of fame that was widely panned by critics and even The Weeknd himself.

And then there was Hurry Up Tomorrow, the absurdly, incomprehensibly stupid filmic tie-in of his most recent album. Intended to further explore his falling-out-of-love with The Weeknd after the L.A. show, instead it only managed to compete with Megalopolis as the most offensively boring movie to premiere in the last 12 months.

But perhaps these failures were because Tesfaye was performing to the wrong crowd, on the wrong stage. His messy, introspective and vague metaphors work better in song lyrics than dialogue; better sung in front of a stunning pyrotechnic flame and fireworks show than on a film screen.

If Sunday's show proved anything, it was that. And even if on the inside he's done with The Weeknd, it proved he can certainly still fake it.