No, The Weeknd Is Not Retiring After The After Hours Til Dawn Tour

Good news for all the avoidants, the red flags and the people-pleasing hot, toxic mess of a people with good taste in music. If you've been looking longingly at reels of Abel Tesfaye performing around that 40-foot statue in the After Hours Til Dawn Tour, wishing it were you in those stadiums, I have good news for you (if you already attended a concert or two, I can't say I'm not jealous, but good for you. There's good news for you, too).

After two years of constant reminders that he will drop The Weeknd persona after Hurry Up Tomorrow and the tour, Abel Tesfaye has announced that retirement is no longer something he's chasing. "I'll never disappear. I love this too much to ever disappear," he said during a recent stop on his After Hours Til Dawn Stadium Tour. "I tested retirement a little bit, and I don't like the way it feels. Imma be here forever with you."

It's a reversal, and not a small one. In January 2025, Tesfaye had announced that he was planning to retire his stage name following the conclusion of his album trilogy, describing the persona as something he'd already mastered and had no further use for. By May that year, promoting the Hurry Up Tomorrow film, he was hedging: the ending felt real, he admitted, but it could also just be a rebirth, who knows? And as recently as this April, mid-show in Mexico City, he told a stadium crowd something closer to a genuine farewell: "One final leg, and I'll disappear… I'll see you on the other side." Four months later, he's telling fans the opposite.

Whatever Tesfaye decides about the name, the tour built around it is winding down on schedule regardless. After Hours Til Dawn launched on July 14, 2022 and has since become the highest-grossing tour by a male solo artist in history, with its final stretch heading to Asia this autumn.

Rumours of The Weeknd's retirement started after the controversies around Sam Levinson's show, The Idol, where Tesfaye played a leading role alongside Lily-Rose Depp, and was one of the creators as well.

These controversies, however, were eclipsed by the massive success of Hurry Up Tomorrow, the album and film that were meant to formalise the exit. Released at the end of January 2025, it became the biggest opening week of Tesfaye's career on the Billboard 200. The tour only made it bigger.

Now that The Idol is out of the internet's collective memory, maybe the retirement was just a big ruse. Or maybe Abel had a change of heart and really does not want to give up on the persona.

Who knows? Maybe we'll learn about it after two more years.