For over a decade now, The Weeknd has been obsessive about self-destruction. Each undertaking, from his hazy trilogy of early mixtapes to his platinum pop star section, has discovered a myriad of how to depict The Weeknd (AKA Abel Tesfaye) in a hopeless cycle of hedonism and hole comedowns, of most pleasure as a way to inflict ache on himself. “Once I’m fucked up, that’s the true me,” he sang ten years in the past on “The Hills,” a nightmarish assertion that he has no path to salvation with out shattering himself again and again.
His 2020 album After Hours marked an important shift: Tesfaye nonetheless reveled in extra, however this time, he acknowledged the wreckage he left behind. With its slick, ’80s-influenced beats and a cinematic edge (little doubt impressed by his flip within the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems), the album felt like a reckoning for his unsustainable conduct. He doubled down with 2022’s Dawn FM, a Purgatory-themed epic that framed his sins as a one-way ticket towards oblivion.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is the ultimate installment of the trilogy that started with After Hours, and in line with a 2023 interview, Tesfaye is contemplating it his ultimate album underneath the identify The Weeknd. It’s, full cease, his most monumental undertaking to-date: 84 minutes, 22 songs, visitor contributions from Lana Del Rey, Playboi Carti, Future, and Florence & the Machine, and manufacturing credit from Pharrell Williams, Max Martin, Mike Dean, Metro Boomin, Justice, Oscar Holter, and dozens extra. And like its predecessors, Hurry Up Tomorrow facilities on themes of self-destruction, existential collapse, and debilitating anguish. Tesfaye claimed he wanted to “kill The Weeknd;” Hurry Up Tomorrow is then his swan tune, displaying the viewers why he’s so intent on letting this character lastly die and beginning over.
You may inform that is an emotional conclusion for Tesfaye, as a result of he’s been teasing the lead as much as this album for over a 12 months. He’s shared Bible verses about loss of life and rebirth, he’s shared teasers with Nietzsche quotes, he’s written esoteric paragraphs about his infinite ache and being locked in a cage of his personal making. The whole lot about Hurry Up Tomorrow, from the spiritual iconography in his one-off São Paulo live performance to the upcoming psychological thriller that may arrive in Could as a “companion movie,” means that The Weeknd is milking this ultimate promotional cycle as a lot as he can, one final try to elevate the Shakespearean proportions of this ‘character’ earlier than reinvention.
As he had on his prior two albums, Tesfaye appears most intrigued by scaling upwards. That is good contemplating his male pop star friends are nowhere close to this stage of conceptual ambition (Ed Sheeran or Drake may by no means), and on the very least, he’s acquired sufficient enthusiasm and character in his voice to information the listener via any jarring sonic shifts. Hurry Up Tomorrow works on the extent of a Massive Pop Album™, and never a lot on the album is difficult to get via or means that The Weeknd is phoning it in. However there are a couple of elements to Hurry Up Tomorrow that don’t work in his favor or current his massive send-off as an enthralling opus.
