As global pop superstar The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour touched down for the first of two nights at Montreal’s Parc Jean-Drapeau on Thursday, it was easy to forget the Toronto artist’s humble underground roots.

When Abel Makkonen Tesfaye began releasing murky alt-R&B tracks under his oblique moniker in 2009, a buzz quickly built around the elusive singer-songwriter, who kept his identity secret.

A series of three mixtapes followed in 2011, as the hype reached epic proportions. A year later, the triptych got a major-label re-release as its own album, Trilogy, and Tesfaye’s career was launched into the stratosphere.

Fast-forward a decade and change and he is one of the biggest pop acts on the planet, a visionary artist who has never strayed from his sinister tales of late-night excess — sex, drugs and post-soul for the wee hours — even as he has polished his act to reach the top of the pop charts with amazing consistency.

Proof of the 35-year-old’s contemporary dominance: he holds the record for the most songs to have been streamed over one billion times on Spotify; the number, according to a count earlier this year, is an astonishing 27.

He played most of them Thursday in a triumphant, career-spanning and heat wave-steamed set of more than two hours before a sellout crowd of 45,000 deliriously joyful fans.........

© Montreal Gazette