The Weeknd is a global megastar, one of the biggest music sensations of the age. Last year, his compilation, The Highlights, was the second best-selling album in the world, and he has 27 songs with over a billion streams on Spotify, which is a record. His latest album is the third part of a trilogy which started, back in 2020 with After Hours. Unfortunately, where that, and its sequel, Dawn FM, were vibrant, contagious, catchy electronic pop, Hurry Up Tomorrow, is morose, lacking tunes and, boy, does it go on and on.
There’s a fair bit worth listening to but, at almost an hour-and-a-half long, there’s also a good chunk that could have been cut. The production is inarguably exciting, polished sci-fi sounds which are, upon occasion, ear-thrilling, as with the folding-in collapse of “Big Sleep” (created with Giorgio Moroder). Songs such as the techno-cumbia “Sao Paulo” use this sonic potency to good effect, but there are not nearly enough of them. Listening to Hurry Up Tomorrow, the brain slowly becomes indifferent to Abel Tesfaye’s moping falsetto over polished Random Access Memories-style future-funk. It just becomes background. The tunes aren’t there.
Tesfaye is jaded. Overworked. Burning out. He has said so. He wants to move on from The Weeknd, to begin again. And this album is a goodbye. “Take me to a time when I was young and my heart could take the drugs and heartache,” he sings over Seventies space synths on “Without a Warning,” a persuasively heartfelt cut, while the cinematic hip hop ballad “Reflections Laughing”, with Florence and the Machine and Travis Scott, theatrically emanates hotel room nights of lonely hedonism, of living in “a gilded cage”.
There are star turns, that, for once, add to the whole, and include, as well as those aforementioned, Lana Del Rey, Justice and Playboi Carti. Hurry Up Tomorrow is musically often interesting, with a smattering of songs that make the ears prick up, a case in point being the piano-led title cut, a slowie wherein Tesfaye, “with no fight left to win”, is “ready for the end”. As those lyrics intimate, he sounds creatively exhausted, out of hooks and gas. There’s worthwhile material here but he’d have done well to have made this personal opus much shorter, and thereby more impactful.
Below: Watch The Weeknd play "Open Hearts" live on the Jimmy Kimmel Show
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