The Weeknd - "Hurry Up Tomorrow"

Technically brilliant

All signs point to this being the last album we’ll get from “The Weeknd”. Abel Tesfaye is seemingly on an artistic path inverted to Sturgill Simpson, who’s last album was released under the moniker Johnny Blue Skies. And maybe that’s a good thing. The Weeknd is one of the biggest artists in the world right now, and has been for the last five years — “Blinding Lights” from his 2020 album, After Hours, is the most-streamed song in the world, rapidly approaching five BILLION streams. The Weeknd also holds the #5 spot on that list with “Starboy”. Going purely off of those rankings, the next-closest artist to The Weeknd would be Ed Sheeran, who holds the 2nd and 11th positions.¹

There’s no denying that it’s an incredible achievement. It speaks to Tesfaye’s artistic sensibilities, specifically his ability to craft addictive melodies and market them. To be completely fair, though, the dominance of “Blinding Lights” can be at least partially attributed to its run on TikTok — which coincided with the height of the Covid-19 lockdown. And I’d like to double-down on that first footnote — other artists who are broadly revered for their songwriting seem to have their listens spread across full albums or even a broader discography, while a few, including The Weeknd, seem to catch lightning in a bottle with specific, singular songs.

There’s a discussion to be had there, for certain, but I think it should be fairly obvious where the preference of this author and publication tends to stand.

Now, for full disclosure (and in Tesfaye’s defense), I only really started paying attention to The Weeknd relatively recently, and he is no stranger to concept albums. In fact, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a concept album which wraps up a trilogy — the first two albums in the trilogy, of course, are 2020’s After Hours and 2022’s Dawn FM. The trilogy is loosely based on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, with each album more-or-less following the arc of the three component cantiche in order:

1. After Hours for Inferno;

2. Dawn FM for Purgatorio; and

3. Hurry Up Tomorrow for Paradiso.

There’s also the obvious timeline progression — pre-dawn, dawn, and “tomorrow”.

These are fun little nuggets, and the timeline is clearly worked into the lyrics and metaphors reliably. However, I have to specify that the albums do not have clear narratives. Each song is a progression in the narrative which also exists in its own microcosm, making it difficult to casually follow along because, on the surface, the songs are about the difficulties of relationships or struggling to stay sober or how exhausting fame is.²

I must also clarify that The Weeknd is a character; a persona. Tesfaye uses this character as both a face to present to the public and a lens through which his personal struggles may be diffused and examined. The lines are intentionally blurred, which adds to the difficulty in trying to follow along with the narrative on the album. First-person statements are used for both the artist (Tesfaye) and the persona (The Weeknd), to the point where events in Tesfaye’s life become The Weeknd’s and vice-versa.

However, Tesfaye made clear in interviews leading up to the release of Hurry Up Tomorrow that it would be his last album as The Weeknd.

Because The Weeknd dies.

And it happens early in the album — on “Baptized in Fear”, which is just track 6 of 22. In the song, he’s paralyzed, lying in a tub, overdosing, and kicks the faucet. He’s still too paralyzed to save himself. And it’s notable that he’s still drowning in the closing and title track, “Hurry Up Tomorrow”, which includes the line, “But now I'm drownin' in the same tub where I learned how to swim”.

This implies that everything after track six is his life flashing before his eyes. Introspection. Realization.

It’s worth noting that the trilogy largely diverts from its Divine Comedy inspiration on Hurry Up Tomorrow. While I haven’t taken the time to try and determine if there is any parallel with Dante’s structure of Heaven and the order of songs on the album, there is a distinct lack of anything resembling a rising action in The Weeknd’s persona. If anything, The Weeknd feels stagnant or even regressive over the course of the album — to the point where the album includes a song titled “Take Me Back to LA”, countering a track on After Hours named “Escape From LA”.

Some of this may be chalked up to the aforementioned dying status, perhaps, but I’m not completely convinced.

Other songs, particularly later in the album, feel entirely unrelated (“Timeless”), or like they only exist so that Tesfaye can say goodbye to The Weeknd outside of the narrative (“The Abyss”; seriously, this one reads like a love song from writer to character).

I suppose what I’m getting at here is that I feel like the concept, and its execution, has been constrained by a lack of commitment. Maybe it’s because Tesfaye leaned too much into ensuring that everything stayed within the bounds of mainstream acceptance; maybe it’s because the concept is too tightly bound to Tesfaye’s reality and is thus hobbled by autobiographical tendencies in Tesfaye’s writing. As much as the album provides plenty of material to analyze and break apart (and is, thus, successful as a work of literature), it doesn’t really work in terms of continuing the trilogy’s conceptual foundation.

There is a metaphorical face-turning (“Turn your face to the sun/to God/etc”) in the last song as The Weeknd finally rejects his hedonistic lifestyle and welcomes death (and Heaven).

I’ve already written quite a lot here, and haven’t really talked about the music much. As I intimated earlier, I love cohesive albums, and none are more cohesive than a good concept album. The irony here is that I don’t think I’ve ever written so much about an album that I actually don’t like all that much.

Let’s start with the labels — like the first two albums in this trilogy, Hurry Up Tomorrow is a grand blend of R&B, Synth Pop, and Trap. There’s SO. MUCH. SYNTH. in this album, and goddamn if I don’t love a dense wall of synth.

So why do I find myself getting bored? Four times now I’ve listened through this album start-to-finish, trying to figure it out and discover what makes it great. Four times. And this sucker runs for 84 minutes. And it bores me.

If you’re new to this publication, please understand that I have a history of ranting about long songs and albums. Mastodon’s Hushed and Grim? Kamasi Washington’s The Epic? Not boring.

There are some good songs here, don’t get me wrong. I think part of the problem is that this album feels like it should be a deeply emotional affair, and yet that emotion never surfaces. It’s all gloss and production and distortion. There’s emotion in the lyrics, but not the delivery. It’s like he can write about all the shit he’s been through but can’t move himself, emotionally. And if he can’t move himself, he can’t move me.

The album is brilliant on many levels, but it’s cold and technical. The closest thing to legitimate emotion on the album is Chxrry22’s voicemail monologue on “Reflections Laughing”. The only time Tesfaye gets close, himself, is with the line “Mama I’m sorry” in “Hurry Up Tomorrow”.

I feel compelled to underscore that this review is an outlier. Other reviewers have largely praised Hurry Up Tomorrow. And for good reason. It has plenty of artistic merit. The loop at the end? Brilliant. The tone that the album finishes with matches the tone that plays in the intro of “High For This”, the opening track of The Weeknd’s debut album/mixtape; the fact that his death here mimics the cover of that same debut is just icing on the cake. The Weeknd’s career is infinite and circular.

But the music largely feels like a letdown. The album’s singles don’t even feel like they’re all that special. I enjoyed “Wake Me Up” and “Open Hearts” more than “Timeless” or “Sao Paulo”; the only real strength in the latter is Anitta’s addictive Brazilian Funk, and the former is both bland and scarred by its Playboi Carti feature, which starts out with an entendre making light of the allegations against Carti. And that definitely doesn’t help my wariness of Tesfaye, who has his share of issues.³

It’s very possible that that has also colored my opinion here.

I also want to point out that he got Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine to feature on “Reflections Laughing” (as well as Travis Scott!) and then gave her glorified backing vocals. It feels like a waste.

On a final note, the album is receiving a companion film, also called Hurry Up Tomorrow, and it’s due out in May. Jenna Ortega will be Tesfaye’s co-star in the project. Maybe it’ll serve to expand and expound the scope of the album; maybe it’ll just give us more stories from women revealing how awful Tesfaye is on-set.

Fingers crossed it isn’t the latter. 2025 is looking plenty dismal already.

Rating: Orange

1. For comparison, the first songs by a few other big artists on this list:

• Noah Kahan’s first breakout hit, “Take Me to Church”, sits at #22

• Taylor Swift has “Cruel Summer” at #31

• Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a timeless classic, is at #36

• Kendrick Lamar shows up at #53 with “Humble”

• Eminem and Linkin Park represent the early aughts with (respectively) “Lose Yourself) (#61) and “In The End” (#62)

With the exception of Queen, these are all artists who have been pretty big in the last 20 years. Swift and Lamar are arguably bigger than ever in the last few years, and the Noah Kahan fever has been raging for about two years now. Eminem and Linkin Park were generational acts who were dominant through the aughts and teens, but might still be hindered by recency bias.

Still, I think the larger story indicated by the numbers here is that some artists focus heavily on polishing singles, while others have more addictive libraries. Other artists with multiple tracks in the top fifty include Post Malone, Drake, Harry Styles, The Chainsmokers, Imagine Dragons, Coldplay, and Billie Eilish. I think Eilish is the only artist here who I might be willing to actively defend in any sense. Maybe Coldplay; depends on how much energy I have that day.

Drake doesn’t even get the basic respect of bolding on his name.

For a direct comparison, check the play counts for After Hours and Folklore, which both released in 2020. The former has a few tracks posting numbers over 1B, but the majority are in the low six-figures; the latter has two 1B+ tracks, but only 6 out of 17 fail to clear 400M. The listens are more spread out.

2. I have to say, without the notations from the dedicated fanbase on Genius, I wouldn’t be able to see the narrative at all. It’s one of those things where subject familiarity is crucial to a proper understanding of what’s being said — you couldn’t walk into the planning meeting at an electrical engineering firm and reasonably expect to follow along unless you have training in the subject.

Similarly, my focus is too broad to really know about specific events being referenced in Tesfaye’s life without somebody else making the connection for me.

This is also a great benefit of not having access to big albums before they release.

3. I almost blacklisted him last year after reading more about the details that had come out, but opted to give him one last chance to grow and do better. He has contributed to philanthropic causes, after all. I’ve yet to see any real apologies from him, though, so he remains on thin ice.