The Weeknd’s opening acts for his global stadium tour, which launches in his hometown of Toronto next Friday, will be R&B/soul singer Snoh Aalegra, Canadian electronic artist Kaytranada and top DJ/producer Mike Dean playing an “improv synth set,” his team reveals in an exclusive interview with PvNew. The full 19 dates, noting which acts are playing in which cities, appear below.
The tour’s original opener, Doja Cat, pulled out last month to undergo throat surgery, and although “the phone was ringing” with calls from interested parties, according to Omar Al-joulani — Live Nation’s president of touring and a Toronto native who has worked with the Weeknd since 2014 — the choices reflect the artist’s long practice of having up-and-coming acts open his tours, even one as massive as the stadium show that will work its way across North America (slowly, due to its size) through Labor Day weekend before moving on to the rest of the world.
see you soon, my love… pic.twitter/mWNn7Z1xon
— The Weeknd (@theweeknd) June 29, 2022
“He’s always been ahead of the curve in terms of the artists that he’s shared a stage with,” Al-joulani says, citing Travis Scott, Halsey, Jhene Aiko, Schoolboy Q, Lil Uzi Vert, Bryson Tiller and Banks. Unusually, the Weeknd almost never has been an opening act himself: “Early on, he opened for Florence and the Machine one time at the Hollywood Bowl and Justin Timberlake in New York, but I think that’s it,” he adds.
This trek was originally scheduled to be an arena tour launching in June of 2020 in support of the Weeknd’s “After Hours” album, which was released just days after the pandemic began in earnest in the U.S. But the blockbuster success of the ten-times platinum single “Blinding Lights” and the Weeknd’s 2021 headlining performance on the world’s biggest stage — the Super Bowl Halftime show — vaulted him into another category of stardom. After a couple of postponements, it was decided to scrap the original tour completely and go big with a stadium-sized show that will highlight both “After Hours” and his most recent album, “Dawn FM,” which the Weeknd (whose real name is Abel Tesfaye) released in January in a deliberately low-key fashion, possibly to give his audience a breather between the ubiquity of “Blinding Lights” and a massive, multi-year world tour.
