Music producer Daniel Lopatin, better known as Oneohtrix Point Never, served as The Weeknd’s musical director during the Superbowl Halftime show yesterday, February 7, according to a post from Warp Records. During the performance The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, performed a number of hits from his entire catalog, from new favorites such as “Blinding Lights” all the way to his 2015 classic “The Hills.”
Watch here
→ https://t.co/ejtCd1WwMW— Warp Records (@WarpRecords) February 8, 2021
Tesfaye and Lopatin have been frequent collaborators during the past couple of years, beginning with the film Uncut Gems, a movie Lopatin scored and Tesfaye made a cameo in. The two also collaborated on the 2020 singles “No Nightmares” and “Scared To Live.” Lopatin is also credited on the After Hours songs “Repeat After Me (Interlude)” and “Until I Bleed Out.”
“Everything just kind of was rolling together for a couple of years for us like we have a whole bunch of music in the pipeline, we worked on After Hours, I was sharing my music, we were having discussions all the time,” Oneohtrix Point Never told Radio.com. “We would get into heated debates about sort of, you know, what constitutes like an interesting song and good production or whatever. I it occurred to me that I was having these conversations so frequently with him, that we were really artistically invested in one another, and when he offered to co-exec I said, ‘sure, like how could you not!?'”
Lopatin released his own studio album Magic last October and debuted a five-song suite called “Midday Suite” ahead of its release. The Weeknd recently rescheduled his After Hours tour to 2022.