When The Weeknd brings After Hours Til Dawn to Wembley Stadium for five nights from 14 August, London will receive the latest version of a tour world that has been mutating since 2022. Under Swedish-Greek artist and scenographer Alexander Wessely, its post-apocalyptic cityscape has become a four-act architecture of collapse: a stadium-scale world where physical set, LED wall, light and smoke form a city that ages, fractures and outlives its performer.
‘The first city was still standing. This one is falling apart while you watch it,’ Wessely tells Wallpaper*. ‘The fracture isn’t a look, it’s the story told through the architecture itself.’ The image that unlocked this version was not a skyline, a screen treatment or a piece of pop iconography, but Abel Tesfaye rising from ash in darkness, caught in slow strobes, ‘coming up out of nothing’. From there, Wessely began thinking in ruins, classical fragments and archaeological remains – broken things with greater presence than complete ones. The stadium becomes an excavated future: sacred, abandoned and, as he puts it, ‘closer to a cathedral than a stage’.
Light is central to Wessely’s vernacular. His route into scenography passed through photography, and he still treats light as a way of giving objects physical consequence, not just visibility. ‘The screen builds images, but light builds mass,’ he says. ‘It’s what gives the real objects on that stage their weight and their volume, what makes them feel like something you could touch rather than something projected.’ Nothing here is lit flat. Every beam, shadow and surface is shaped so the physical world can hold its own against the scale of the screen.
Across the show’s chapters, the set and LED wall are made to blur until the seam disappears. The screen becomes the city continuing past the limits of steel, light and stage engineering. At its centre sits Hajime Sorayama’s patinated steel figure – chrome body, machine idol, relic from a civilisation that, as Wessely says, ‘mistook the machine for a god’.
Ahead of The Weeknd’s Wembley dates, Wallpaper* spoke to Wessely about designing collapse at stadium scale, making light behave like architecture, and giving an artist’s private descent a city the audience can stand inside.
Alexander Wessely on his apocalyptic set design for The Weeknd
Wallpaper*: After Hours Til Dawn began in 2022 with a post-apocalyptic cityscape. This latest chapter feels darker and more fractured. How has the set evolved since that first iteration, and did it need to age with the trilogy?
Alexander Wessely: This is a trilogy about a man losing himself, so the world can’t stay the same from start to finish; it has to carry the same damage he does. The set ages the way he ages. It starts whole, and it ends in ash. That’s more or less the whole idea. The fracture isn’t a look; it’s the story told through the architecture itself.
W*: How does the creative conversation work between you, Abel and La Mar Taylor?
AW: La Mar co-founded XO with Abel and has been his creative director from the very beginning, so he’s shaped this world alongside him for years. He’s the show director across all of this, and this was our first full-on collaboration, a real dialogue rather than a handoff. La Mar and I have gotten closer ever since the Coachella headline show we did in 2022, working together more and more. A lot of the show comes from Abel himself, real things from the past couple of years, fighting his demons in very personal ways. He sets the emotional truth of it, and we build the world that holds it. The best moments are the ones none of us could have reached alone. My job is to give the feeling an architecture, to turn what he’s living through into a space you can stand inside.
‘My job is to give the feeling an architecture, to turn what he’s living through into a space you can stand inside.’
Alexander Wessely
W*: Were there any key architectural decisions that shaped how the audience experiences the show?
AW: Scale, and where you put the human inside it. Everything was built so you feel the size of the world before you find the man in it. We used set extensions so the physical architecture keeps going past what your eye can actually verify, and at some point the stadium itself starts to feel like part of the ruin.
W*: What are the visual cues that distinguish each chapter of the tour – colour, pace, light, atmosphere – and how do they guide the audience through the story?
AW: Each chapter has its own state of collapse and its own temperature. The peak is gold, monumental, slow, worship at its highest. The middle fractures, colder, faster, the image breaking apart. The end strips it all back to a single figure in near silence. The colour and the pace carry the descent, so you never have to tell the audience where they are in the story. They feel the fall in the light before they’d ever read it.
W*: Where does the physical set end and the digital world begin? Is the LED wall a surface, a horizon, or a second stage? What can the screen say that the physical stagecraft cannot?
AW: The whole point is you shouldn’t be able to tell. That’s what excites me, that blur between what’s real and what’s not, practical or digital. It’s the same thing I chased at Sphere Las Vegas. The physical set is built to bleed into the screen, so the seam disappears and you lose the horizon. The wall isn’t a backdrop; it’s the world continuing past what you can actually build. What the screen does, that steel and light can’t, is change scale in a second. It can turn Abel into a giant and then into dust before you’ve caught up. The physical stuff gives you weight and truth. The screen gives you transformation. You need both, or the fall doesn’t feel real.
‘The physical stuff gives you weight and truth. The screen gives you transformation.’
Alexander Wessely
W*: The show is built around a vast urban landscape in collapse. How do you design a city that is meant to fall apart?
AW: You build it in stages. The city moves through different states of ruin across the night, so the audience isn’t looking at a collapse; they’re moving through one. The important part is that it has to start from something big enough that losing it matters. If the city didn’t feel monumental first, watching it come apart wouldn’t do anything. So a lot of the work early on was making it feel solid and real, so that when it starts breaking down later you actually feel the loss of it.
W*: How did you think about Abel’s body against that scale? Is he swallowed by the world, directing it, or surviving it?
AW: All three, and in that order. He starts vast, a giant at the peak of his own worship, gold, untouchable. Then the world turns on him, and he glitches, damaged, not in control of his own image anymore. And, by the end, he’s back to human scale, one to one, and then he’s gone. That arc of his body against the architecture is the whole story for me. He’s worshipped, then swallowed, then reduced to just a man, and the world outlives him.
W*: How closely do the lighting, effects and screen environments respond to the music? Are there any songs that demanded their own visual world outside the wider narrative?
AW: The whole environment is scored to the music; it breathes with it instead of sitting behind it, and, in some moments, breaks out of the wider story completely and demands its own world. A show this long needs moments that stop the narrative and hold you somewhere else for a minute before the fall keeps going. Abel’s catalogue makes that easy in one way and brutal in another, because the music already tells his life, so you’re working visually against ten years of that. It’s tough competition, honestly.
W*: Hajime Sorayama’s sculpture is central to the tour’s visual identity. It feels futuristic, weathered, erotic and almost archaeological. How important was that tension between machine, relic and body?
AW: That tension is the whole thing. Sorayama’s work sits exactly where mine does, between the machine and the body, the future and the ruin. His sculpture reads as something worshipped or dug up, a relic from a civilisation that mistook the machine for a god. I met him in Tokyo, and the language was immediate; we’re both circling the same question: what does the human worship when it doesn’t know what it believes anymore? The chrome body at the centre of the show is that question, made monumental.
‘What does the human worship when it doesn’t know what it believes anymore?’
Alexander Wessely