The Weeknd’s new album, Hurry Up Tomorrow is out now.Universal Music Canada/Supplied
“Now I’m ready for the end,” the Weeknd sings on Hurry Up Tomorrow, the closing number and title track on his brilliant new album. “So, burn me with your light, I have no more fights left to win.”
The Canadian pop supernova born Abel Tesfaye has indicated that this album will be the final one under the moniker the Weeknd, his unknowable persona. The title is a big fat clue: Tesfaye can’t wait until the Weeknd is over.
The concept album is a brooding, cinematic epic and a restless suicide story set to late-night synth-pop. The first of 22 tracks, Wake Me Up, feels funereal at first – “fade to black” – before thrilling us like peak Michael Jackson. The King of Pop also created a persona: an androgynous, racially ambiguous creature of beats, hooks and dance steps. He didn’t know how or when to kill off the character, though. In the end, it killed him.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is the Weeknd’s sixth album and the final volume of a trilogy that includes 2020’s After Hours and 2022’s Dawn FM. The album cover of Dawn FM shows the then 32-year-old superstar as a greying, elderly man. One of the world’s most dominant recording artists has grown old in his service of us.
There’s nothing particularly new sonically here. The lean music shimmers darkly; the Weeknd’s brooding croon and wounded melisma are familiar. Tracks seamlessly transition from one to the next. Guest appearances are made by Travis Scott and Florence and the Machine (both on Reflections Laughing), Future (Given Up on Me), Lana Del Rey (The Abyss), disco icon Giorgio Moroder (on Big Sleep, and on the album in general, stylistically). Playboi Carti and Brazilian singer Anitta show up on previously released singles Timeless and Sao Paulo, respectively.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is the Weeknd’s sixth album.Universal Music Canada/Supplied
The album drops ahead of a coming film co-written by and co-starring the L.A.-based Weeknd. Inspired by the record, it also features Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan and is being described as a psychological thriller, which tells you almost as much about the record as it does about the movie.
On Cry For Me, the protagonist is not breathing and slowly bleeding: “I hope that I live life for a reason, but at least you’ll play this song when I’m gone …”
A phone rings during Reflections Laughing but it’s not picked up. A female voice leaves a message: “My girl told me she saw you in Dallas, said you didn’t look good. … Don’t let this industry break you, baby, don’t let them take you from me.”
The Weeknd cancelled a concert at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium in 2022 after he lost his voice early in the show. The incident appears to be referenced on an interlude track – “I can’t sing!” – and on Without a Warning: “But now my bones are frail, and my voice fails.”
On that song and elsewhere, there is a longing for a simpler, prefame time and a desire to return home to Toronto. When the Weeknd remembers himself as a “ghost,” it’s a reference to the days when he passed anonymously. The Scarborough-raised singer-songwriter name-checks a Toronto hotel and describes himself as a “kid from the borough.” And on Take Me Back To LA: “Take me back to a place, where the snow would fall on my face/ And I miss my city lights, I left too young.”
The closing tracks are mellow and melodramatic. In his “conversations with the sky,” he asks for mercy. The final track segues into a hint of High For This, the first track on the Weeknd’s debut mixtape, 2011’s House of Balloons.
That was 14 years ago. All this time we’ve been wondering where Abel Tesfaye begins and where the mysterious Weeknd ends. Now we know. It ends here.
The Weeknd’s just announced After Hours Til Dawn tour visits Vancouver’s BC Place, July 15; Edmonton’s Commonwealth Stadium, July 19; Montreal’s Parc Jean Drapeau. July 24; Toronto’s Rogers Centre, July 27 and 28.
