That album cover is some real A24 shit. The image that Abel Tesfaye chose for Hurry Up Tomorrow, the new record where he supposedly bids goodbye to his time as the Weeknd, wasn’t out in the world until the album arrived on streaming services last night. It’s a striking picture — the top half of Tesfaye’s face, jaggedly tilted and captured in mid-howl greyscale. He’s got sweat beading all over his forehead and scrunched-up eyes, and he looks a bit like James Brown or one of the other classic soul singers whose music only influences the Weeknd’s sound in the most distant of ways. The album’s title appears in big, blocky letters that seem to be sliding out of focus, while the album’s many, many track titles appear in a tiny font that creeps up the side. It could be a production still from The Brutalist, and Tesfaye clearly intends for the album to stand as that kind of grand, towering statement.
Much like The Brutalist, Hurry Up Tomorrow probably could’ve used an intermission. It’s so long. It’s so fucking long. The 22 tracks on Hurry Up Tomorrow aren’t all songs. A few of them are brief transitional pieces, there to make sure everything flows along cohesively and to highlight some of the ideas that the Weeknd wants to bang home. Still, you’re looking at a sold 84-minute block of moody, gluey, echo-drunk synth-dirge music. The sheer sprawl of Hurry Up Tomorrow means this review will be even more premature than most Premature Evaluations. We didn’t get an advance of this bad boy, and even playing it on constant repeat from the moment that I woke up, I’m writing this shit after a few listens. This review is a first impression, and my first first impression is: Holy motherfuck, this thing is long.
When big pop stars release overwhelmingly long albums like this, you can often justifiably accuse them of attempting to pad their own streaming numbers. I don’t think that’s what the Weeknd is doing with Hurry Up Tomorrow, or at least I don’t think it’s all he’s doing. The Weeknd has things to say, and those things revolve around the death of the Weeknd. Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t just a concept album; it’s a Concept Album, the kind that demands capital letters. Abel Tesfaye is pulling a Ziggy Stardust, killing off his alter-ego in grand fashion.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen the death of the Weeknd; the character has been killed in many vividly gruesome ways over a long run of music videos. But Tesfaye has framed Hurry Up Tomorrow as his last Weeknd album, and death haunts his music even more than usual. The record is an auteurist finale that’ll probably have a lot to do with the Hurry Up Tomorrow movie that’ll apparently arrive in theaters later this year. The best way to experience it is to give yourself over to the vastness, to let it sweep you away.
There are reasons to be worried about the Hurry Up Tomorrow movie. It’s got a starry cast, with Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan alongside Tesfaye himself, and a buzzy director, the Waves/It Comes At Night auteur Trey Edward Shults. But The Idol, the Weeknd’s A24-produced HBO show, was a notorious if watchable boondoggle, and the movie has at least one of the same producers. Last year, a Hollywood Reporter exposé claimed that the Hurry Up Tomorrow movie “has been sitting in postproduction for a year and, according to sources, prospective buyers aren’t biting.” So that’s not good. (Since then, Lionsgate has reportedly picked it up.) The Weeknd clearly has cinematic ambitions, and parts of the Hurry Up Tomorrow album align with the kinds of real-life episodes that will probably become movie scenes. The moment where Tesfaye lost his voice while performing at SoFi Stadium, for instance, seems to be his equivalent of Kanye West’s car crash, the mythic foundational trauma that he keeps referencing again and again.
But a movie is one thing, and an album is another. Presumably, most of the people reading this review are not professional music critics dealing with tight deadlines, wondering whether the Weeknd is intentionally trying to fuck up their weekend. Every Weeknd project, going all the way back to the House Of Balloons mixtape, stands as an extended mood-piece, a deep-immersion wallow in miserable hedonism. Time will tell whether the Weeknd knows how to make a movie, but he’s an expert at this particular thing. The buzz around the release of Hurry Up Tomorrow has been surprisingly slight, for reasons that probably have to do with the way that The Idol landed with a splat. But Hurry Up Tomorrow follows After Hours, one of the best pop blockbusters in recent memory, and Dawn FM, an album that didn’t reach blockbuster status but that might be even better. The guy knows what he’s doing.
From the first moments of Hurry Up Tomorrow, you can tell that you’re in safe hands. The Weeknd starts off the opening track “Wake Me Up” by framing his own impending demise in cinematic terms. Over a sample of Giorgio Moroder’s haunted, synth-pulsing Scarface score, Tesfaye envisions the end: “All I have is my legacy/ I been losing my memory/ No afterlife, no other side/ I’m all alone when it fades to black.” But “Wake Me Up” doesn’t fade to black. Instead, it snaps into sudden color when the beat drops — a blaring, kinetic, expensive blog-disco boom that was co-produced by Justice. Everyone else at Stereogum says it sounds like “Thriller,” and I agree, but only the theoretical “Thriller” that was produced by Moroder instead of Quincy Jones.
If you’re allergic to the Weeknd’s pretentious self-regard, fair enough. But that pretentious self-regard is nothing new; it goes back to when he was seducing us into self-destruction over Beach House samples a decade and a half ago. The Weeknd took a mixtape-aesthete sensibility and used it to build one of this century’s greatest catalogs of pop bangers, so his grandiosity hasn’t put that many people off. It’ll take a while before we know how Hurry Up Tomorrow stands next to House Of Balloons or After Hours, but I can already tell you that it’s a worthy addition to the man’s discography, even if it doesn’t immediately emerge as the masterpiece that he almost certainly wants it to be. This guy sounds amazing when he’s singing his paranoid-vulnerable feathery-falsetto confessions over impeccably sound-designed synth-noir soundscapes, and he does a lot of that here.
He’s not really trying to make bangers this time, or at least he’s not trying to make bangers that stand alongside his definitive bangers. Back in September, the Weeknd released “Dancing In The Flames,” a fun but derivative ’80s-style synthpop track that sounded like an attempt to recapture the “Blinding Lights” magic. That song was going to be the album’s lead single, but it didn’t catch on, and it does not appear on the final product. Instead, the biggest early hit, still nowhere near as big as many past Weeknd hits, is “Timeless,” the beep-squiggle trap groove where Tesfaye trades bars with his future stadium-tour opening act Playboi Carti. “Timeless” has catchy moments, but it’s not the kind of rocket-propelled hook-machine that the Weeknd sometimes makes. It’s a slight variation on an established mood, and that mood holds strong throughout Hurry Up Tomorrow.
On “Timeless,” the Weeknd absorbs Playboi Carti’s skittering, insistent rage-rap sensibility into his own murky-glitter sound. Something similar happens on “São Paolo,” the other advance single, which has booming, ticcing baile funk drums and cut-up Anitta chants but which is still very much a Weeknd song, with all the sleek sonic architecture and lost-libertine yearning that the form demands. The Weekend might invite wilder, more chaotic underground sounds into his lonely mansion, but he’s not letting anyone track mud on all those gleaming mirrored surfaces. Even “Open Hearts,” the one reunion with Tesfaye’s past hitmaking co-conspirator Max Martin that made the cut on Hurry Up Tomorrow, doesn’t register as a sudden endorphin-rush. Instead, it’s a got a sinister goth-rave pulse, as if it was built to soundtrack a slo-mo nightclub shootout in a mid-budget ’90s action movie. (That’s a compliment, obviously.)
If all of the tracks on Hurry Up Tomorrow worked like those ones — if they all injected subculture-vulture juice into the Weeknd’s digital Hollywood-vampire blues — then the album would be an unmitigated triumph. But Hurry Up Tomorrow is a little too frontloaded for that. The jolts of energy mostly arrive early. As the album continues, the Weeknd retreats further into the glossy darkness of his comfort zone. The record’s bulk is devoted to familiar sounds and images, and as it progresses, my mind wanders more and more. But it’s a pleasant wander. The Weeknd’s lonesome-cokehead tenor has never sounded better, and the you can get happily lost in the bad-dream synth-swooshes that the Weeknd cooked up with longtime collaborators like Mike Dean and Oneohtrix Point Never. Call it a mitigated triumph, then.
Where Max Martin has been a guiding light on Weeknd records, Hurry Up Tomorrow is much more interested in a different Euro-pop hitmaker: the aforementioned Giorgio Moroder, probably the party most responsible for introducing paranoid experimental synth-bleep drama to the club in the first place. The Moroder that the Weeknd loves the most isn’t the Moroder who makes electronic disco anthems with Donna Summer in the ’70s, and it’s definitely not the Moroder of ’80s-soundtrack bangers like “Flashdance… What A Feeling” and “Take My Breath Away.” (That’s probably the Moroder that Max Martin loves best.) Instead, the Weeknd’s favorite version of Moroder is the film-score version. Moroder’s best scores are the ones that make you feel like movie characters are rocketing straight toward the inescapable doom that the fates have already planned for them, and that Moroder is all over Hurry Up Tomorrow. He even shows up in the flesh, reciting the “now I lay me down to sleep” prayer through endless layers of vocoder over his own sampled Midnight Express theme on “Big Sleep.”
Like a tragic movie hero, the Weeknd — the persona, not necessarily Abel Tesfaye the real guy — spends all of Hurry Up Tomorrow drifting toward the oblivion that he knows he can’t change. This time, the cause of death is us, the listeners. This is one more album about the exquisite agony of pop stardom. The Weeknd sings about gilded cages and penthouse prisons, about blocking his ears to keep from hearing the screams of the crowd, about how “fame is a disease.” He’s on his Chappell Roan shit. Even when he’s flexing, he’s confessing: “Like a middle-aged child star, way I’m fuckin’ tweakin’/ 3AM Sunset, flyin’ like a phoenix.” When he’s on tour, he feels dizzy, unmoored, on the brink. And he’s always on tour. He’s been lying to our faces. He’s always been wasted, it’s too late to save him. He just hopes that we’ll play this song when he’s gone.
Do you have real problems? Are you allergic to the woe-is-me pleas of the pampered celebrity class? Yeah, me too. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the life of a pop star is often a disorienting, dangerous drag. At different points on Hurry Up Tomorrow, the Weeknd imagines himself drowning in a bathtub, or falling from a great height. In either case, he wouldn’t be the first pop star to check out that way. The way he depicts himself on this album, he’s too far gone to care. Even old friends reappear to call him back, but he’s beyond reach. Future shows up on “Enjoy The Show” in singer mode, quoting “Can’t Feel My Face” and describing someone else as his favorite drug. On “The Abyss,” Lana Del Rey sleepily intones, “Baby, you’re running away.” Doesn’t he know it.
More than once, the Weeknd cries out that he wants to die at his peak. You can only hope that he means it in the figurative sense. Lord willing, Abel Tesfaye wants to put his sweetly evil alter-ego to bed when that persona can still pack stadiums and dominate the pop charts. If that’s what he wants, he might’ve just missed his poetic little window. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a little too bloated and repetitive to work as the Weeknd’s definitive statement, and I can’t picture more than a few of its tracks reaching his personal pantheon. Still, if the Weeknd isn’t at his peak, he’s not far off. Fifteen years after House Of Balloons, there’s still nobody else who can evoke this kind of woozy, self-hating debauchery on this level. The last song on Hurry Up Tomorrow is the title track, a starkly beautiful hymn where Tesfaye goes into his most fragile Michael Jackson flutter-coo, begging his mother for forgiveness and praying to see heaven when he dies. If this really is the end for the Weekend, then it’s a beautiful demise. You could almost make a movie about it.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is out now on XO/Republic.
