A decade after Abel Makkonen Tesfaye’s alter ego The Weeknd broke into the mainstream with Beauty Behind the Madness, he returns with his pupported final album, Hurry Up Tomorrow. Building on the immersive and cinematic experiences of his last two albums (After Hours and Dawn FM), Hurry Up Tomorrow is a 90-minute, narrative-focused, 22-track ‘experience’ that muses on death and the perils of fame.
Fans of The Weeknd’s earlier pop-synth hits will still find enjoyable tracks here. The album opens with the Michael Jackson Thriller-era R&B stylings of ‘Wake Me Up’ (featuring French music duo Justice) and the dark synth pop-inspired ‘Cry For Me’. From there, the Weeknd pivots into Brazilian reggae with ‘Sao Paulo’ (featuring Anitta). The collaboration will likely be the album’s most prominent commercial hit.
But The Weeknd is ultimately uninterested in spinning out any more big commercial smashes that gave him star power. The melodic earworms that occupied 2016’s Starboy with the help of Daft Punk are gone. In fact, Starboy is the polar opposite to Hurry Up Tomorrow. That 2016 album saw The Weeknd rise into a true international pop star.
Hurry Up Tomorrow is most concerned with dealing with the price of that fame, and is obsessed with ideas of Tesfaye ‘killing’ his pop star persona, which he previously parodied in the hit film Uncut Gems. The album consistently references a 2022 concert in which he cancelled a show mid-song, having lost his voice. The crisis of confidence makes for an angsty album, rife with contemplations of death, isolation and drug abuse.
The result is a slickly produced but bloated work more interested in itself than the listener’s experience. The album’s second act is particularly slow, but ballads like ‘Take Me Back To LA’ and ‘Give Me Mercy’ spin us into an epic final act.
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“All I have is my legacy. I been losing my memory. No afterlife. No other side. I’m all alone,” begins the first lines on the album. While Hurry Up Tomorrow may be The Weeknd’s final outing, there is little doubt that Abel Makkonen Tesfaye is an incredible musician with decades of work ahead of him (he’s only 34). Unless you’re an ardent fan, skip Hurry Up Tomorrow and await Tesfaye’s rebirth.
