The Weeknd debuts the song Tokyo in Japan with the singer Yoko Takahashi

The Weeknd opened the Asian leg of his stadium tour at Belluna Dome in Saitama, near Tokyo, on 19 September, and used it to give an unreleased song its first public airing. Most outlets are calling the track Tokyo; Pitchfork reported that a title and release date are still to be announced, and SPIN described it as thought to be called that. It was played again at the second Belluna Dome show the following night.

Yoko Takahashi came out to perform it with him. She is the singer of A Cruel Angel's Thesis, the opening theme of the 1995 series Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the new song incorporates it. After that she sang the theme itself for the crowd while Abel Tesfaye played along. The visuals were built by Yoko Taro, the writer and director behind the NieR games, and drew on imagery from both NieR:Automata and the anime. Tesfaye credited the segment afterwards as presented by Yoko Taro featuring Yoko Takahashi.

It is the second unreleased song he has shown live this year. In April he debuted Rio in Brazil with Anitta, a performance that came with an animated film directed by Takashi Miike.

All of which cuts against the retirement he spent two years hinting at. Tesfaye repeatedly suggested he would put the stage name away after 2025's Hurry Up Tomorrow, the record that closed the trilogy begun with After Hours and continued on Dawn FM, and said he had overcome every challenge available to him under it. Then he told a Stockholm crowd he was not going anywhere, saying he had tested retirement and did not like the way it felt, and repeated it in interviews. He told GQ Asia he is remastering his Japan-influenced 2013 debut Kiss Land.

The Japanese shows were built around local collaborators. At the centre of the stage stands a roughly 40-foot Hajime Sorayama sculpture, more than twice the size of the statue used on earlier legs, hand-carved from polystyrene foam by craftsmen in Toyama, finished in gold with high-gloss aluminium paint, with lasers in the eyes and smoke from the palms. Tetsuya Nakamura contributed masks and armour, Yohji Yamamoto POUR HOMME made stage looks, a three-floor pop-up took over the Universal Music Store in Harajuku, a Seibu Railway train ran wrapped in tour artwork by Yoshitaka Amano, and Tokyo Tower was lit in Kiss Land green on 18 September.

The numbers behind it are the reason a farewell kept getting postponed. After Hours Til Dawn has run since 2022, passed one billion dollars in gross last year, and has sold more than 7.5 million tickets across 153 shows, making it the highest-grossing tour by a male solo artist. The 2026 European and UK leg alone took more than 345 million dollars across 42 shows. The 17-date Asian run goes to Jakarta on 26 and 27 September, then Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and Hong Kong, before finishing in Kuala Lumpur on 4 November; the dates sit in the tour guide alongside the rest of the pop and R&B and soul calendar.