It’s the end of The Weeknd – and the Monday-morning blues have descended with a vengeance on the final album from the artist best known for Blinding Lights, his sci-fi megahit.
The musician born Abel Tesfaye has announced that he is retiring the stage name he first adopted as an obscure Toronto producer and DJ – and he’s going out in a blaze of misanthropy. On Hurry Up Tomorrow, summer melodies meet bummer vibes, topped off with The Weeknd going all in on his Michael Jackson-having-an-existential-crisis singing style.
This album is also the first we have heard from the singer and producer since The Idol. That appalling HBO drama series, from 2023, which also featured Lily-Rose Depp, was apparently his attempt to emulate Stanley Kubrick and Brian De Palma. Alas, what ended up on screen was less Clockwork Orange than TikTok cringe.
It went viral for its unpleasant depiction of a Britney Spears-type pop star and for Tesfaye’s listless acting. The backlash seemingly sent Tesfaye into a epic funk – a state of mind not helped by his decision to embark on a gruelling world tour while The Idol was still airing.
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He appears to have poured his trauma into the world-weary Hurry Up Tomorrow. It is a reminder that Tesfaye was never cheerful – not even at the height of his career, when Blinding Lights made him one of the most streamed artists in music history.
The only child of Ethiopian immigrants to Canada, he had started out releasing music anonymously on YouTube, his material’s trippy, untethered qualities exacerbated by his heavy intake of MDMA, ketamine and cough syrup. He nowadays describes himself as “sober lite”, meaning he restricts himself to drinking and smoking weed.
Yet whatever his chemical intake, the phantasmagorical qualities of his early output endure on Hung Up Tomorrow, which spirals into a hall of mirrors of dread and frustration. Anger isn’t his energy – more an ever-ratcheting anxiety that isn’t without its relatable qualities yet, over the course of 22 tracks and 80 minutes, becomes overwhelming, then numbing. And then simply tedious.
That Tesfaye has negotiated the music industry with a chip on his shoulder was confirmed by his boycott of the Grammys in 2021, after the judges blanked his LP After Hours. He finally ended the stand-off with a surprise appearance at this year’s ceremony. A moody interlude amid the glitz and backslapping, it had the feeling of a musician tying up loose ends.
That desire for closure carries through to Hurry Up Tomorrow. It’s an album that matters an awful lot to Tesfaye, who apparently assumes that the audience is equally invested in the idea that The Weeknd, after so much success, is about to drop the mic.
He departs not with a bang but with a howl of anguish – which feels thoroughly on message for a performer who has long surfed on loner angst and whiny entitlement. That mix of man baby and pop prodigy doesn’t sound particularly promising, yet Tesfaye has made it work, particularly with Blinding Lights and with the unforgettable 2021 peak-Covid Super Bowl show where he pretended to be lost inside a hall of mirrors – a grimly comedic moment that chimed perfectly with the our then ongoing lockdown trauma.
He holds to that formula on Hurry Up Tomorrow. His sixth LP is a beautifully assembled but rather mewling and babyish cry into the void. Musically, it evokes Tesfaye’s go-to icons, Jackson and Prince. There’s certainly no lack o’ Jacko on the opening track, Wake Me Up, a collaboration with the French house monsters Justice that decides halfway through that it wants to be the funk breakdown from Jackson’s Thriller (the bit just before the dancing ghouls turn up).
The spirit of Purple Rain-era Prince is evoked on the dirge-like Open Hearts, on which The Weeknd showcases his expressive voice, a gift for epic arrangements and a stonking lack of originality. The tune unfolds as gorgeous facsimile – a retro power ballad that lacks anything resembling a new idea but is propelled by what comes across as boundless reservoirs of self-importance.
Tesfaye does not stint on collaborators. Florence Welch, the human air-raid siren, and Travis Scott, the rapper, join him for the overblown Reflections Laughing. The noirish retro grooves on Big Sleep are courtesy of the late disco godhead Giorgio Moroder.
The biggest name to feature is Lana Del Rey. Sadly, she merely coos in the background on The Abyss, so that she sounds like another shiny bauble that Tesfaye has brought into his world, hoping it cheers him up.
Instead, his misery seems only to intensify on an album that blends buoying melodies with woe-is-me lyrics and ends up as directionless as Tesfaye in his Super Bowl maze, a little boy lost in a labyrinth of empty opulence.
