That album cowl is a few actual A24 shit. The picture that Abel Tesfaye selected for Hurry Up Tomorrow, the brand new file the place he supposedly bids goodbye to his time because the Weeknd, wasn’t out on the planet till the album arrived on streaming companies final evening. It’s a hanging image — the highest half of Tesfaye’s face, jaggedly tilted and captured in mid-howl greyscale. He’s bought sweat beading throughout his brow and scrunched-up eyes, and he appears to be like a bit like James Brown or one of many different basic soul singers whose music solely affect the Weeknd’s sound in essentially the most distant of how. The album’s title seems in huge, blocky letters that appear to be sliding out of focus, whereas the album’s many, many monitor titles seem in a tiny font that creeps up the facet. It could possibly be a manufacturing nonetheless from The Brutalist, and Tesfaye clearly intends for the album to face as that form of grand, towering assertion.
Very similar to The Brutalist, Hurry Up Tomorrow most likely might’ve used an intermission. It’s so lengthy. It’s so fucking lengthy. The 22 tracks on Hurry Up Tomorrow aren’t all songs. Just a few of them are transient transitional items, there to verify all the things flows alongside cohesively and to spotlight a number of the concepts that the Weeknd needs to bang residence. Nonetheless, you’re taking a look at a offered 84-minute block of moody, gluey, echo-drunk synth-dirge music. The sheer sprawl of Hurry Up Tomorrow means this this evaluate shall be much more untimely than most Untimely Evaluations. We didn’t get an advance of this dangerous boy, and even enjoying it on fixed repeat from the second that I awoke, I’m scripting this shit after just a few listens. This evaluate is a primary impression, and my first first impression is: Holy motherfuck, this factor is lengthy.
When huge pop stars launch overwhelmingly lengthy albums like this, you may usually justifiably accuse them of trying to pad their very own streaming numbers. I don’t assume that’s what the Weeknd is doing with Hurry Up Tomorrow, or at the very least I don’t assume it’s all he’s doing. The Weeknd has issues to say, and people issues revolve across the demise of the Weeknd. Hurry Up Tomorrow isn’t only a idea album; it’s a Idea Album, the type that calls for capital letters. Abel Tesfaye is pulling a Ziggy Stardust, killing off his alter-ego in grand trend.
This isn’t the primary time that we’ve seen the demise of the Weeknd; the character has been killed in lots of vividly ugly methods over a future of music movies. However Tesfaye has framed Hurry Up Tomorrow as his final Weeknd album, and demise haunts his music much more than ordinary. The file is an auteurist finale that’ll most likely have rather a lot to do with the Hurry Up Tomorrow film that’ll apparently arrive in theaters later this 12 months. One of the simplest ways to expertise it’s to offer your self over to the vastness, to let it sweep you away.
There are causes to be anxious concerning the Hurry Up Tomorrow film. It’s bought a starry solid, with Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan alongside Tesfaye himself, and a buzzy director, the Waves/It Comes At Night time auteur Trey Edward Shults. However The Idol, the Weeknd’s A24-produced HBO present, was a infamous if watchable boondoggle, and the film has at the very least one of many identical producers. Final 12 months, a Hollywood Reporter exposé claimed that the Hurry Up Tomorrow film “has been sitting in postproduction for a 12 months and, in line with sources, potential consumers aren’t biting.” So that’s not good. (Since then, Lionsgate has reportedly picked it up.) The Weeknd clearly has cinematic ambitions, and components of the Hurry Up Tomorrow album align with the sorts of real-life episodes that can most likely turn into film scenes. The second the place Tesfaye misplaced his voice whereas acting at SoFi Stadium, for example, appears to be his equal of Kanye West’s automobile crash, the mythic foundational trauma that he retains referencing many times.
However a film is one factor, and an album is one other. Presumably, most people studying this evaluate are usually not skilled music critics coping with tight deadlines, questioning whether or not the Weeknd is deliberately making an attempt to fuck up their weekend. Each Weeknd challenge, going all the best way again to the Home Of Balloons mixtape, stands as an prolonged mood-piece, a deep-immersion wallow in depressing hedonism. Time will inform whether or not the Weeknd is aware of find out how to make a film, however he’s an skilled at this explicit factor. The thrill across the launch of Hurry Up Tomorrow has been surprisingly slight, for causes that most likely must do with the best way that The Idol landed with a splat. However Hurry Up Tomorrow follows After Hours, top-of-the-line pop blockbusters in latest reminiscence, and Daybreak FM, an album that didn’t attain blockbuster standing however that could be even higher. The man is aware of what he’s doing.
From the primary moments of Hurry Up Tomorrow, you may inform that you simply’re in protected palms. The Weeknd begins off the opening monitor “Wake Me Up” by framing his personal impending demise in cinematic phrases. Over a pattern of Giorgio Moroder’s haunted, synth-pulsing Scarface rating, Tesfaye envisions the tip: “All I’ve is my legacy/ I been dropping my reminiscence/ No afterlife, no different facet/ I’m on their own when it fades to black.” However “Wake Me Up” doesn’t fade to black. As an alternative, it snaps into sudden shade when the beat drops — a blaring, kinetic, costly blog-disco growth that was co-produced by Justice. Everybody else at Stereogum says it feels like “Thriller,” and I agree, however solely the theoretical “Thriller” that was produced by Moroder as a substitute of Quincy Jones.
In case you’re allergic to the Weeknd’s pretentious self-regard, honest sufficient. However that pretentious self-regard is nothing new; it goes again to when he was seducing us into self-destruction over Seashore Home samples a decade and a half in the past. The Weeknd took a mixtape-aesthete sensibility and used it to construct one among this century’s biggest catalogs of pop bangers, so his grandiosity hasn’t put that many individuals off. It’ll take some time earlier than we all know how Hurry Up Tomorrow stands subsequent to Home Of Balloons or After Hours, however I can already let you know that it’s a worthy addition to the person’s discography, even when it doesn’t instantly emerge because the masterpiece that he virtually definitely needs it to be. This man sounds wonderful when he’s singing his paranoid-vulnerable feathery-falsetto confessions over impeccably sound-designed synth-noir soundscapes, and he does a lot of that right here.
He’s not likely making an attempt to make bangers this time, or at the very least he’s not making an attempt to make bangers that stand alongside his definitive bangers. Again in September, the Weeknd launched “Dancing In The Flames,” a enjoyable however spinoff ’80s-style synthpop monitor that appeared like an try to recapture the “Blinding Lights” magic. That tune was going to be the album’s lead single, nevertheless it didn’t catch on, and it doesn’t seem on the ultimate product. As an alternative, the largest early hit, nonetheless nowhere close to as huge as many previous Weeknd hits, is “Timeless,” the beep-squiggle entice groove the place Tesfaye trades bars along with his future stadium-tour opening act Playboi Carti. “Timeless” has catchy moments, nevertheless it’s not the form of rocket-propelled hook-machine that the Weeknd generally makes. It’s a slight variation on a longtime temper, and that temper holds robust all through Hurry Up Tomorrow.
On “Timeless,” the Weeknd absorbs Playboi Carti’s skittering, insistent rage-rap sensibility into his personal murky-glitter sound. One thing comparable occurs on “São Paolo,” the opposite advance single, which has booming, ticcing baile funk drums and cut-up Anitta chants however which remains to be very a lot a Weeknd tune, with all of the glossy sonic structure and lost-libertine craving that the shape calls for. The Weekend would possibly invite wilder, extra chaotic underground sounds into his lonely mansion, however he’s not letting anybody monitor mud on all these gleaming mirrored surfaces. Even “Open Hearts,” the one reunion with Tesfaye’s previous hitmaking co-conspirator Max Martin that made the minimize on Hurry Up Tomorrow, doesn’t register as a sudden endorphin-rush. As an alternative, it’s a bought a sinister goth-rave pulse, as if it was constructed to soundtrack a slo-mo nightclub shootout in a mid-budget ’90s motion film. (That’s a praise, clearly.)
If all the tracks on Hurry Up Tomorrow labored like these ones — if all of them injected subculture-vulture juice into the Weeknd’s digital Hollywood-vampire blues — then the album can be an unmitigated triumph. However Hurry Up Tomorrow is a bit too frontloaded for that. The jolts of power largely arrive early. Because the album continues, the Weeknd retreats additional into the shiny darkness of his consolation zone. The file’s bulk is dedicated to acquainted sounds and pictures, and because it progresses, my thoughts wanders an increasing number of. However it’s a pleasing wander. The Weeknd’s lonesome-cokehead tenor has by no means sounded higher, and the you will get fortunately misplaced within the bad-dream synth-swooshes that the Weeknd cooked up with longtime collaborators like Mike Dean and Oneohtrix Level By no means. Name it a mitigated triumph, then.
The place Max Martin has been a guiding mild on Weeknd information, Hurry Up Tomorrow is far more taken with a distinct Euro-pop hitmaker: the aforementioned Giorgio Moroder, most likely the celebration most chargeable for introducing paranoid experimental synth-bleep drama to the membership within the first place. The Moroder that the Weeknd loves essentially the most isn’t the Moroder who makes digital disco anthems with Donna Summer season within the ’70s, and it’s undoubtedly not the Moroder of ’80s-soundtrack bangers like “Flashdance… What A Feeling” and “Take My Breath Away.” (That’s most likely the Moroder that Max Martin loves greatest.) As an alternative, the Weeknd’s favourite model of Moroder is the film-score model. Moroder’s greatest scores are those that make you are feeling like film characters are rocketing straight towards the inescapable doom that the fates have already deliberate for them, and that Moroder is throughout Hurry Up Tomorrow. He even exhibits up within the flesh, reciting the “now I lay me right down to sleep” prayer via infinite layers of vocoder over his personal sampled Midnight Specific theme on “Huge Sleep.”
Like a tragic film hero, the Weeknd — the persona, not essentially Abel Tesfaye the true man — spends all of Hurry Up Tomorrow drifting towards the oblivion that he is aware of he can’t change. This time, the reason for demise is us, the listeners. That is yet another album concerning the beautiful agony of pop stardom. The Weeknd sings about gilded cages and penthouse prisons, about blocking his ears to maintain from listening to the screams of the group, about how “fame is a illness.” He’s on his Chappell Roan shit. Even when he’s flexing, he’s confessing: “Like a middle-aged little one star, method I’m fuckin’ tweakin’/ 3AM Sundown, flyin’ like a phoenix.” When he’s on tour, he feels dizzy, unmoored, on the brink. And he’s at all times on tour. He’s been mendacity to our faces. He’s at all times been wasted, it’s too late to save lots of him. He simply hopes that we’ll play this tune when he’s gone.
Do you have got actual issues? Are you allergic to the woe-is-me pleas of the pampered superstar class? Yeah, me too. However there’s loads of proof to recommend that the lifetime of a pop star is usually a disorienting, harmful drag. At completely different factors on Hurry Up Tomorrow, the Weeknd imagines himself drowning in a tub, or falling from a terrific peak. In both case, he wouldn’t be the primary pop star to take a look at that method. The best way he depicts himself on this album, he’s too far gone to care. Even outdated buddies reappear to name him again, however he’s past attain. Future exhibits up on “Take pleasure in The Present” in singer mode, quoting “Can’t Really feel My Face” and describing another person as his favourite drug. On “The Abyss,” Lana Del Rey sleepily intones, “Child, you’re working away.” Doesn’t he understand it.
Greater than as soon as, the Weeknd cries out that he needs to die at his peak. You’ll be able to solely hope that he means it within the figurative sense. Lord keen, Abel Tesfaye needs to place his sweetly evil alter-ego to mattress when that persona can nonetheless pack stadiums and dominate the pop charts. If that’s what he needs, he would possibly’ve simply missed his poetic little window. Hurry Up Tomorrow is a bit too bloated and repetitive to work because the Weeknd’s definitive assertion, and I can’t image various of its tracks reaching his private pantheon. Nonetheless, if the Weeknd isn’t at his peak, he’s not far off. Fifteen years after Home Of Balloons, there’s nonetheless no person else who can evoke this sort of woozy, self-hating debauchery on this degree. The final tune on Hurry Up Tomorrow is the title monitor, a starkly stunning hymn the place Tesfaye goes into his most fragile Michael Jackson flutter-coo, begging for his mom for forgiveness and praying to see heaven when he dies. If this actually is the tip for the Weekend, then it’s a lovely demise. You could possibly virtually make a film about it.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is out now on XO/Republic.