There are artists you listen to because you like a few of their songs, and then there are artists who somehow manage to build an entire universe around their music. The Weeknd has been doing the latter for years. His music has always felt less like a collection of songs and more like the soundtrack to some neon-lit alternate reality where everybody is beautiful, nobody sleeps, and making questionable decisions after midnight is apparently a full-time occupation.
Now Abel Tesfaye has taken that universe to Japan, where he debuted a previously unreleased song during the Asian leg of his massive After Hours Til Dawn tour. The performance took place at Belluna Dome near Tokyo and featured Japanese singer Yoko Takahashi, the voice behind one of anime’s most recognizable opening themes, “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis” from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
And because apparently simply performing a new song wasn’t dramatic enough, the whole thing came wrapped in a multimedia production involving Yoko Taro, the creative mind behind the NieR video game series. The result pulled imagery and ideas from both Neon Genesis Evangelion and NieR: Automata, turning what could have been a simple guest appearance into a full-blown audiovisual event.
The new track has been referred to as “Tokyo” and incorporates elements of Takahashi’s “A Cruel Angel’s Thesis.” During the performance, Takahashi also performed the iconic theme in full while The Weeknd stepped back and watched from the rear of the stage. Tesfaye’s social media credit for the collaboration was simply, “Presented by YOKO TARO ft. YOKO TAKAHASHI.” Naturally, the internet is now left to do what the internet does best: dissect every frame and speculate about what the hell we’re looking at.
This isn’t even the first time The Weeknd has used his tour as a traveling laboratory for new music. Earlier this year, during his Rio de Janeiro performance, he debuted another unreleased track called “Rio” with Brazilian superstar Anitta. That performance was accompanied by an animated film directed by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. Apparently Abel’s definition of a tour now involves flying around the planet, collaborating with people from completely different creative worlds and casually dropping new music in each city. Meanwhile, most of us are proud when we remember where we parked.
And about that retirement…
There’s another interesting wrinkle here.
For a while, it looked like The Weeknd might actually be preparing to walk away from the character and name that made Abel Tesfaye one of the biggest stars on the planet. Following Hurry Up Tomorrow in 2025, Tesfaye had talked about eventually retiring The Weeknd persona, completing a trilogy that began with After Hours and continued through Dawn FM.
That apparently lasted about as long as most celebrity retirement announcements.
Tesfaye has since made it pretty clear that he isn’t going anywhere. He has publicly said that he tried the idea of retirement and didn’t like it, telling fans that he loves the job too much to disappear. His recent comments make the situation considerably less mysterious: The Weeknd isn’t dead, retired or quietly walking off into the sunset. He’s still making music, still performing and still finding increasingly elaborate ways to mess with our expectations.
And honestly, that’s probably for the best.
The numbers are getting ridiculous
At this point, The Weeknd doesn’t exactly need another résumé boost, but apparently the universe has decided we’re going to keep adding things to it.
He’s won four GRAMMY Awards from 14 nominations, including Best Urban Contemporary Album for Starboy and Best Melodic Rap Performance for “Hurricane.”
He’s also collected five No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200, including Beauty Behind the Madness, Starboy, My Dear Melancholy, After Hours and Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Then there’s “Blinding Lights,” which has essentially stopped behaving like a normal song. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, spent four weeks at the top and eventually became Billboard’s No. 1 song of all time on its Greatest of All Time Hot 100 chart. Billboard later also named it the top song of the first 25 years of the 21st century.
His After Hours Til Dawn tour has become equally absurd in scale. Billboard reported that the tour surpassed $1 billion in worldwide grosses, making it the highest-grossing tour in history by a male solo artist, with more than 7.5 million tickets sold across 153 shows at the time of that milestone.
So when The Weeknd shows up in Tokyo and casually drops a new song with the voice of Evangelion, a legendary game designer and an anime connection that could have been ripped directly from some fever dream, we’re probably past the point where any of this should surprise us.
The Weeknd and horror have always made sense
I’ve always appreciated the darker side of The Weeknd’s work, and part of that is his ability to make music feel cinematic. His catalog has always lived somewhere between R&B, pop, electronic music and straight-up psychological horror.
I actually got to experience that connection firsthand when I went through The Weeknd-inspired haunted house at Halloween Horror Nights a few years ago. It was one of those weird moments where the music, visuals and atmosphere all clicked together. The Weeknd has created such a distinct visual identity around his music that translating it into a horror attraction actually made perfect sense.
His obsession with film and visual storytelling isn’t exactly subtle either. The After Hours era in particular turned into an elaborate visual world, with music videos and performances that felt like pieces of one giant story rather than isolated promotional material.
Now he’s taking that same approach into Japanese pop culture, and frankly, it’s a hell of a combination.
Tokyo is only the beginning
The Asian portion of the After Hours Til Dawn tour continues through Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand and Hong Kong before concluding in Kuala Lumpur in November. The tour has already established itself as one of the biggest concert productions on the planet, so adding new music and unexpected collaborations along the way only makes the whole thing more interesting.
And for those of us who have been following the whole “The Weeknd is retiring” saga, apparently we can put the funeral flowers back in storage.
He’s here.
He’s making music.
He’s still The Weeknd.
And now he’s making songs with anime legends in Japan.
I’ll take it.
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