"Lore" has become a buzzword in pop music in recent years, as stars pepper their lyrics with cryptic hints about their personal relationships. Fans spend the aftermath of a new album piecing together the clues on social media, with everyone involved seemingly mistaking tabloid gossip for confessional authenticity.
The Weeknd, on the other hand, has refreshingly avoided the whole thing, instead cultivating a shadowy, mysterious persona that's preoccupied with sex and drugs while sharing almost nothing about who he is aside from his penchant for self-destruction. When he sings about someone who can "show me how to love" on "Blinding Lights" (by far the most-streamed song on Spotify), it doesn't even occur to me to wonder who he might be singing about, since his songs live in a seedy fantasy world rather than reality.
Which brings us to Hurry Up Tomorrow — apparently the final Weeknd album, and the first one obviously rooted in his real life. Abel Tesfaye has been speaking in the press about his plans to kill off his Weeknd persona after this album, and his retirement provides the thematic through line for these 22 anxious, uneasy tracks. "All I have is my legacy," goes the first line from opener "Wake Me Up" — a sentiment that returns in various forms many times over the next 84 minutes, with death frequently used as a metaphor for the end of the project.
Hurry Up Tomorrow sounds absolutely gorgeous. The returning presence of electronic experimentalist (and film score composer) Oneohtrix Point Never, who also appeared on 2020's After Hours and 2022's Dawn FM, signals that the Weeknd is more concerned with moody cinematics than the straight-up hit-making one might expect from one of the world's top-streamed artists.
The resultant album is cohesive, but slightly tiring; bogged down in ballad after ballad, all draped with the Weeknd's pretty but repetitive vibrato falsetto. Not a note is out of place, but self-flagellating dirges like "Reflections Laughing," "Take Me Back to LA" and the dour closing run of songs sound like the Weeknd on autopilot. Since he's kept his personal life so private over the past 15 years, it's hard to feel very invested in his conflicted feelings about fame. I understand that losing his voice during a 2022 live show must have been a difficult moment, but I frankly don't care about that enough to need an interlude called "I Can't Fucking Sing."
Of the many mid-tempo ballads, the only ones that stand are the pillowy soft rock tones of "Give Me Mercy" and the vintage "Toronto sound" chipmunk soul of "Niagara Falls" — atmospheric delights with actual melodies rather than just vocal runs.
Where are the hooks? Hurry Up Tomorrow is so tasteful-sounding — and so exhaustive in its exploration of "being famous is hard" — that Tesfaye often neglect proper melodies. The only contribution from Max Martin, the robo-thumping "Open Hearts," is hardly the Weeknd's best pop anthem, but the contrast emphasizes the shortcomings of much of the rest of the tracklist. Similarly, "São Paolo" may not have been a great pre-album single, but its spiky synth riff is the only time when Hurry Up Tomorrow dares to be a bit obnoxious.
"The Weeknd, whatever that is, it's been mastered. No one's gonna do the Weeknd better than me, and I'm not gonna do it better than what it is right now," Tesfaye recently told Variety. Hurry Up Tomorrow proves him right: he's absolutely nailed the sound of maximalist, moody pop R&B, taking it from his humble House of Balloons origins to the biggest stages imaginable.
He says that he's not going to get better than he already is; comparing Hurry Up Tomorrow to his past work, I believe him. If this really is the end of the Weeknd, he's not quite going out on a high, but it's a suitable bookend to the career of a generational superstar.