One finger raised, 54,000 voices answered: The Weeknd's requiem in Goyang

Hyundai Card Superconcert 28 The Weeknd, Oct. 7–8

A 12-meter golden idol and a 40-song chronicle — beginning to end

120 minutes that burned the idol and revealed the man, Abel

Pop star The Weeknd returns to South Korea for the first time in eight years. [Photo provided by Sebastien Nagy]

He simply stood still and raised a finger. The roar of 54,000 people turned in unison to follow it. There were no synchronized dance formations, no celebrity guests. The Weeknd, back in South Korea for the first time in eight years, commanded a vast stadium with nothing but his voice.

"I missed you. Korea!"

The pop star met his Korean audience Wednesday and Thursday at Goyang Sports Complex in Gyeonggi Province for Hyundai Card Superconcert 28 The Weeknd. Each night drew 54,000 fans, filling the venue to 108,000 over two nights. Since Seoul's Jamsil Olympic Stadium entered renovation, the Goyang complex has become the go-to venue for major international acts — and its standing zone left no room to spare.

The main stage was packed with the rubble of collapsed buildings — evoking ancient ruins or the wreckage of a dystopian end-of-days. Designer Alexander Vesely, who built the stage alongside creative director Rama Taylor, told British design magazine Wallpaper that the concept grew from images of ruins and fragments of classical architecture. In his words, the space feels "less like a stage, more like a cathedral." At the center of a cross-shaped thrust stage stood a 12-meter robotic sculpture designed by Japanese artist Sorayama Hajime. The golden female figure rotated slowly, exhaling plumes of smoke.

Green lasers split the stadium as dancers in red robes formed ranks, and The Weeknd emerged wearing a silver mask encrusted with crystals — its two eye sockets glowing green. The opening song was "Baptized in Fear." He worked through seven songs — including "Starboy," "Heartless" and "Faith" — before finally removing the mask. The artist who launched his career hiding his face had appeared behind a mask and taken it off with his own hands.

The Weeknd's real name is Abel Tesfaye. He was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1990 to Ethiopian immigrant parents. When he released his 2011 mixtape "House of Balloons," he refused interviews and kept his face hidden. His songs — painting pleasure and emptiness in noir strokes — dragged a grammar that had lived on the fringes of R&B into the center of pop.

When that boyish, smiling face was finally revealed, the screams filled the Goyang sky. Wrapping his arms around himself as if embracing the crowd's response, he opened with "I missed Korea." He then looked back: "My 2018 show in Korea was my first-ever stadium show. We have a special relationship."

His first visit to Korea was in December 2018, when about 24,000 fans packed Seoul's Gocheok Sky Dome to welcome a new pop star. He was 28, a standard-bearer for alternative R&B that blended hip-hop, rock and electronic music into the genre's core. He had three Grammy trophies to his name by then, though some critics noted his sets felt too short. By coincidence, that show was billed as Hyundai Card Culture Project 28 — the same number he carried back to Korea, this time to a crowd more than four times larger.

The city on stage soon caught fire. When "São Paulo" arrived, pillars of flame erupted from the rubble, and the heat reached the audience. Vesely has said the stage was designed to open intact and end in ash — four acts moving through worship, fracture, cinders and resurrection. Fans of an artist who spent 15 years singing about a city of pleasure and emptiness found themselves standing in the middle of that city's collapse.

For two full hours, the stage belonged to one person. The dancers stayed in the background. Dressed in a multi-pocketed vest, The Weeknd walked the length of the stage like an explorer picking through ruins. His movements were modest — a gentle sway that recalled a tourist-bus shuffle. What filled the space instead was a live vocal performance that was both thrilling and smooth. When he pressed a finger to his lips, the stadium fell quiet; when he threw out a single unaccompanied line, the crowd sang every word back without a gap.

In eight years, he had become a completely different caliber of artist. "Blinding Lights," released in November 2019, set the world dancing in the middle of a pandemic. Billboard named it the greatest Hot 100 song of all time in 2021, and last August it became the first song in Spotify history to surpass 5 billion streams. In February 2021, he headlined the Super Bowl halftime show.

The glory was not uninterrupted. "After Hours" (2020), the album containing "Blinding Lights," failed to receive a single Grammy nomination. He declared a boycott of the ceremony and did not return to the Grammy stage until February 2025. At a Los Angeles concert in September 2022, his voice gave out mid-song and he stopped the show — an experience he later said he took as a sign that he had said everything he had to say.

This tour's history compresses those turbulent eight years into a single arc. The "After Hours" tour was set to begin in arenas in 2020 but was postponed twice by the pandemic. In the interim, "Dawn FM" arrived in 2022, and he scaled up to stadiums, hitting the road in July 2022 under the name "After Hours Til Dawn." In January 2025, "Hurry Up Tomorrow" completed the trilogy, and he signaled his intention to retire the stage name The Weeknd. The tour closes with this Asian leg.

The Goyang stage translated that narrative into a grand spectacle. A setlist of roughly 40 songs formed a chronicle that opened with his newest work and traced back to his debut. Three songs from "Hurry Up Tomorrow" led the way, with the trilogy accounting for about half the set. Six in every 10 songs were tracks that did not exist eight years ago. He also performed "Tokyo," an unreleased song he first unveiled at his Japan shows. Catalog favorites from 2018 — "Can't Feel My Face" and "The Hills" — were woven in between. The wristbands in the crowd blinked in time with the beat, their light falling like rain, or perhaps snow.

The fan service was generous. He came down from the stage to high-five audience members, and during "Out of Time" he handed the microphone to the crowd. The notes were often off, but the cheers only grew louder, and The Weeknd pulled the fan who sang into a hug. On the first night, after finishing "One of the Girls," he removed his in-ear monitors and sunglasses and said, "I want you to know how much I love Korea." On the second night, Jennie of Blackpink made a surprise appearance during that same song and performed alongside him.

Delivering roughly 40 songs in two hours meant a significant number were cut after one or two verses. Before listeners could settle into the arc and afterglow of each beloved track, the next one arrived, and fatigue set in during a mid-show stretch of consecutive mid-tempo songs. Audience reactions were mixed. It is a curious irony that a concert by the artist who rewrote the records of the streaming era ended up resembling a playlist. The show was meant to take stock of 15 years, but the connective tissue between songs was swallowed by the pace of the hits.

Even so, the concert carried real weight. Korean fans witnessed, on the final leg of his farewell journey, the moment an artist who started on the margins of the 2010s and arrived at the center of 2020s pop chose to close the door himself. The climax came as "Save Your Tears" rolled into "Blinding Lights" — the screens erupted in white light and the entire stadium leapt.

He did not stop at his most famous song. The main set closed with "Adaptation," a B-side from his 2013 album "Kiss Land," and the encore reached all the way back to "House of Balloons" — the very beginning. Fireworks filled the night sky during the final song, "Moth to a Flame." "The voices on this Friday night in October are beautiful," he told the crowd, then made a promise as he left the stage: "I'll be back in Korea soon." He had already been conducting what amounted to a funeral for the era of The Weeknd, saying he had "accomplished everything" under that name — so whether the one who returns will be The Weeknd or Abel Tesfaye remains an open question.

shee@heraldcorp.com