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”. Produced by French electronic pioneers Justice, 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.
“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.
