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USA Today
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
The Weeknd's final act? New 'Hurry up Tomorrow' album hints at curtain call
After a weeklong delay, The Weeknd dropped a new album Thursday night. "Hurry Up Tomorrow," the third and final chapter in his "After Hours" trilogy, was originally set for a Jan. 24 release. After wildfires destroyed large swaths of land and displaced hundreds in the Los Angeles area, however, the artist postponed the drop and canceled an accompanying show set to take place at the Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California. Proceeds from "Take Me Back To LA" − a track on the new album − will be donated to LA Regional Food Bank, according to a release announcing the project. After the concert cancellation, The Weeknd also donated to $1 million to the LAFD Foundation, a firefighter organization, GoFundMe's Wildfire Relief Fund and the LA Regional Food Bank. Now, the project is live across streaming platforms offering fans a look into the elusive artist's musical mind. Following up 2020's "After Hours" and 2022's "Dawn FM," "Hurry Up Tomorrow" has a confessional quality to it − heavy on conflicted love songs, light on ballads. It samples voicemails, heavy breathing and conversation intervals, breaking the fourth wall at times to let listeners in on the emotion behind the music. In an interview with Variety earlier this month, the artist hinted that this album may be the end of The Weeknd − the persona Abel Tesfaye has long employed when performing. Need a break? Play the USA TODAY Daily Crossword Puzzle. "It's a headspace I've gotta get into that I just don't have any more desire for. I feel like it comes with so much," he told the outlet. "When is the right time to leave, if not at your peak? Once you understand who I am too much, then it's time to pivot.' That pivot was seemingly previewed in the accompanying text for "Hurry up Tomorrow." "Whether it's the end of a trilogy or the end of The Weeknd, Tomorrow is here," the project's description on Apple Music reads. The Weeknd goes deep on 'Enjoy the Show' With his signature falsetto vocals, the music offers an ethereal sound but doesn't hesitate to cut through it periodically with old-school disco loops. Chronicling heartbreak, fear, and industry woes the tracks bleed into one another clearly designed to be listened to as a whole rather than single-by-single. Addiction, a theme long-mined by The Weeknd, weighs heavy on the album, particularly in "Enjoy The Show." In it, the artist alludes to a cyclical battle and seems to gesture at the audience that this is his final act. "And when the curtains call / I hope you mourn," he sings, "but if you don't, I hope you enjoyed the (expletive) show / Let me know." On "Baptized In Fear," either through metaphor or actual recounting, he sings of a near-drowning and a decision to live rather than give in − a theme throughout the project. The Weeknd album features include 'The Abyss,' 'Reflections Laughing' The album is full of surprising features ranging from Florence + The Machine and Travis Scott, to Future and Lana Del Ray. "Reflections Laughing," a mid-album track features Florence while "Abyss," one of the project's final songs features Del Ray. In "Sao Paulo," a previously released single with Playboi Carti, The Weeknd speeds past some of the rest of the album with a heart-pounding techno beat. Later this year, The Weeknd will also release a feature film to accompany the album. He'll star alongside Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan in the psychological thriller, which will hit theaters May 16.
The Independent
31-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
On Hurry Up Tomorrow, The Weeknd delivers a spectacular final chapter in his ‘After Hours' trilogy
'All I have is my legacy,' Abel Tesfaye sings over the funereal opening bars of 'Wake Me Up'. It's a scene-setting moment for what, it soon emerges, is the Canadian artist's most ambitious project to date – a feature film-length album that supposedly serves as the final chapter for his enigmatic alter-ego The Weeknd. Later this year, he'll star opposite Wednesday actor Jenna Ortega and Saltburn 's Barry Keoghan in an actual feature film inspired by this record – a psychological thriller underpinned by his restless, sprawling score. A noted cinephile, Tesfaye has always incorporated film influences into his work. His debut album, 2013's culture-shifting Kiss Land, tapped into the kind of jittery, menacing paranoia that directors such as John Carpenter or David Cronenberg made their calling card. Hurry Up Tomorrow' s predecessor, 2022's Dawn FM, enlisted Jim Carrey as a creepy radio host and borrowed the tagline of 1987's Less Than Zero ('It only looks like the good life') for his track of the same name. Hurry Up Tomorrow, though, is the first album of Tesfaye's that actually feels like a movie, scored by his trademark maelstrom of electronic and R&B. The third and final installment of his After Hours 'trilogy', it has supporting characters (Brazilian superstar Anitta, Florence and the Machine, rappers Future, Travis Scott and Playboi Carti), props (the abrupt ring of a telephone and rattle of ice in a whisky glass on 'Reflections Laughing'), and a character arc that casts Tesfaye in his preferred role: the brooding, mysterious anti-hero. The 34-year-old has previously suggested Hurry Up Tomorrow was inspired, in part, by a traumatic incident that took place in 2022. Emerging onstage in Inglewood, California, he called out to the crowd: 'Hey, Los Angeles!' His voice cracked. When Tesfaye tried to sing his next line, nothing came out. Footage of the moment shows the stunned artist, looking close to tears as his fans erupted into their own howls of dismay. The show was cancelled. Those screams can be heard here in the transition from a brief interlude ('I Can't F***ing Sing') into the juddering 'São Paulo', likely inspired by last year's triumphant live-streamed stadium show in Brazil. Half the time, you don't know if Tesfaye is singing to a lover or personifying his tricky relationship with fame, that cruel mistress. 'Are you real or are you illusion?/ Cos I feel your love's my delusion,' he asks on 'Wake Me Up', then, on 'Reflections Laughing', alludes to the pressure on his shoulders: 'I won't make a sound/ Blood on the ground/ When they take my crown/ If they take my crown.' Though born and raised in the Toronto suburbs by his mother and grandmother, Tesfaye has always seemed magnetised by the dark allure of Los Angeles – its hypocrisies, its vanity, its strangeness. He delayed the album's release due to the recent wildfires, with proceeds from the track 'Take Me Back to LA' going towards a charity providing emergency food assistance to those affected. The song in question nods again to that doomed Inglewood show ('my voice cracking when we scream'). It's certainly deliberate that his voice, with its Michael Jackson-influenced melisma, is at its most supple. Meanwhile, Tesfaye seems to yearn for those House of Balloon days of releasing mixtapes from a place of anonymity: '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 transitions here are remarkable; skipping a single track feels akin to jumping three chapters in a novel. The Giorgio Moroder-indebted synths of 'Take Me Back to LA' melt into, well… Giorgio Moroder on the synths for 'Big Sleep'. Tesfaye pushes the pedal down on 'Drive' and sends himself plummeting into 'The Abyss', an ornate flurry of glissando piano notes that fall like the snow of his beloved Toronto. Fast-forward and you risk missing a surprise cameo, from Lana Del Rey's spectral cries to the gorgeous sample of Nina Simone's 'Wild is the Wind' on 'Given Up on Me'. It would be easy to dismiss this album as indulgent – particularly after Tesfaye gave everyone the collective ick in HBO's ludicrous misfire of a series The Idol – but Hurry Up Tomorrow is impressive for its ambition alone. So many pop stars in Tesfaye's multi-billion-streaming, Grammy-winning, stadium-selling position would have tried to placate fans with an album stuffed full of ready-made hits. Enjoy unlimited access to 100 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 4 month free trial (3 months for non-Prime members) 'Fame is a disease,' he declares on 'Drive', having earlier confessed: 'I just wanna die when I'm at my f***ing peak.' By the title track, closing out the album on brighter (still Eighties-coded) piano chords, he sounds resolved: 'So burn me with your light/ I have no more fights left to win.' Then, a truly startling moment as Tesfaye offers the most personal lyrics of his career to date: 'I took so much more than their lives/ They took a piece of me/ And I've been tryin' to fill that void that my father left/ So no one else abandons me, I'm sorry.' If this truly is the last Weeknd album, you could hardly hope for a better finale. Roll credits.
