The Weeknd rolled into Croke Park on Saturday night and delivered exactly what you would expect from one of the biggest pop acts on the planet right now. Big screens, big sound, big production. But somewhere in the middle of all that spectacle, something was missing.
Abel Tesfaye has built his entire brand around a kind of brooding, hyper-sexual mystique. His music drips with it. So it was genuinely surprising that standing in front of tens of thousands of Dublin fans, the man himself gave off almost none of that energy in person. The songs were all there. The voice was all there. The charisma, though, was playing hard to get.
That is not to say the night was a disappointment. Far from it. The show was a genuine spectacle and the Croke Park crowd were in great form from early on, singing back every word of his back catalogue with real enthusiasm. When the hits landed, they landed hard. Blinding Lights still does something to a crowd that very few songs from the last decade can match. The place absolutely erupted.
The stage setup was enormous, the kind of production that takes weeks to assemble and probably costs more than most Irish venues see in a year. Visuals were sharp and dramatic throughout, and the lighting crew clearly earned their money on the night. From a pure technical standpoint, it was a masterclass in how to fill a stadium.
But then there was the Nespresso moment. At one point during the show, what can only be described as a full-on coffee advertisement played out on the giant screens, complete with glossy visuals and that unmistakable premium brand feel. The crowd did not quite know what to do with it. A few laughs, a few confused looks, and then it was gone. It was faintly ridiculous, the kind of corporate intrusion that reminded everyone that at this level of pop stardom, the line between artist and brand ambassador gets very blurry very fast.
Tesfaye has reinvented himself a few times over the years. The After Hours era gave him a genuine artistic peak, and the Starboy run before that made him one of the most played artists in the world. The current tour is built around his more recent work, which leans harder into synth-pop and stadium anthems. It works on a large scale, no question, but some of the darker, stranger edges that made his earlier stuff so compelling have been smoothed away.
The Dublin crowd did not seem too bothered by any of that analysis, to be fair. People were there to have a good time and the good time was delivered. Croke Park on a warm Saturday night with a sold-out crowd has its own energy that can carry a lot, and it certainly helped here.
Support acts warmed things up well enough before Tesfaye took to the stage, and by the time he appeared the crowd was well and truly ready. He opened with a run of tracks that got the energy up quickly, and the pacing of the set was generally well handled. There were a few slower moments in the middle that let things dip a little, but the closing stretch brought it all back home.
For a lot of people in that crowd, this was a bucket list show. The Weeknd does not come to Dublin every year, and Croke Park gigs at this scale are always an event in themselves regardless of who is playing. Taken on those terms, Saturday night delivered.
It just would have been something else entirely if the man at the centre of it all had brought a bit more of himself to the stage rather than letting the production do most of the heavy lifting. The music is personal, often uncomfortably so. The performance, at least on this night in Dublin, kept things at a safer distance than the songs themselves ever do.
Still, thousands of people left Croke Park happy, hoarse, and already sharing videos on their phones. In the end, that is probably the only review that matters.