As if it didn’t take long enough to get to the 21st installment of Coachella — what with a pandemic, four postponements and yet another recent Covid spike — when original Sunday headliner Kanye West pulled out two weeks ago, Swedish House Mafia had to transform their vaguely defined position on the lineup into a headlining set. In short order the Weeknd — who is still deep in work on his HBO series “The Idol,” which he cowrote, coproduced and stars in — agreed to bump up his previously planned brief appearance with the EDM titans to a co-headlining spot with them, but he had just two weeks to pull together a set. Yet the man otherwise known as Abel Tesfaye is nothing if not up for a challenge, and he did not disappoint during the tag-team, co-headlining, festival-closing set late Sunday night (actually Monday morning).
Billed as “Swedish House Mafia x the Weeknd,” the set was essentially split into two halves, with the former opening and roaring through a tight set of their own hits, then performing briefly with the Weeknd for a couple of the recent songs they’ve released together, then ceding the stage to him for a tight megamix of his songs, ranging from global smashes like “Blinding Lights,” “I Can’t Feel My Face” and “Starboy” to his verses on high-profile collabs with Kanye West, Drake, Future and Ty Dolla $ign (who were not present), “Hurricane,” “Crew Love,” “Low Life” and “Or Nah,” respectively.
The Weeknd spent much of the set singing from the walkways that stretched into the crowd. actually singing many of the requisite “Coachella!”s and “How you doin’ over here?”s and “I can’t hear you!”s, rather than the usual shouting that we’d heard hundreds of times by the end of the long, livestreamed weekend.
The Weeknd performs “Can’t Feel My Face” at #Coachella. (
