Is this Abel Tesfaye’s final album as The Weeknd? Possibly. Probably. Or maybe not. In a recent interview, the king of streaming-era synth-pop spoke about “closing this chapter” but stopped short of making it official. “No one’s gonna do The Weeknd better than me, and I’m not gonna do it better than what it is right now,” he told Variety. “I think I’ve overcome every challenge as this persona.”
Clues abound on ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’, The Weeknd’s sixth studio album and the final part of a loose trilogy about pulling back from the brink. It began with 2020’s banger-packed ‘After Hours’, home to the most-streamed song in Spotify’s history, ‘Blinding Lights’, then continued with 2022’s more transitional ‘Dawn FM’.
Here, he’s preoccupied with hurting, healing and moving on. “Why waste another precious hour?” he sings over a cascading piano line on ‘The Abyss’. ‘Enjoy The Show’, one of several introspective ballads, features the fatalistic lyrics: “I don’t wanna make it past 34 / And when the curtains call, I hope you mourn.” Tesfaye will turn 35 next month.
There’s also a sense of finality in the album’s sprawling 84-minute runtime, which is probably slightly too long, and the glittering cast list. Previous collaborators Lana Del Rey, Playboi Carti, Travis Scott and Future swing by for cameos. Disco pioneer Giorgio Moroder contributes to ‘Big Sleep’, which sounds a bit like Pet Shop Boys on heavy narcotics. And when The Weeknd channels Michael Jackson on the brilliant ‘Wake Me Up’, he brings influential house duo Justice along for the ride.
When he tells us that “fame is a disease” on ‘Drive’ or laments being trapped in a “penthouse prison” on ‘Cry For Me’, these are hardly original ideas. But they do feel like authentic expressions of anguish from The Weeknd, who started out tentatively in 2009 with his identity hidden and grew into a stadium-filling superstar. “Sold my crib to Madonna / Might connect to my fathеr,” he sings on the album’s dreamy centrepiece ‘I Can’t Wait To Get There’. Childhood trauma and A-list connections on the same verse? That’s our Weeknd.
Though ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ has plenty of his usual moody synth-pop, it’s also speckled with experimentation: he pulls off throbbing Brazilian funk on ‘São Paulo’ and flirts with Kanye-style chipmunk soul on ‘Niagara Falls’. Sequenced at the end, the title track sounds like the theme of an ’80s movie: not inappropriate given that ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ will be accompanied by a film of the same name. Co-starring Tesfaye alongside trendy actors Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, it’s due in May.
So, if this is a swansong for The Weeknd, it’s a fitting one. Tesfaye is pushing forward before he exhausts the collective fascination with his alter ego, and that’s no small achievement. When he sings “I’d rather leave somewhat of a legacy” on ‘The Abyss’, it’s clear there’s no “somewhat” about it.
Details
- Release date: January 31, 2025
- Record label: XO/Republic Records