It’s Legacy-Assessment Time For The Weeknd on ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’
At the end of 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Gene Wilder’s grinning candy mogul reminds Charlie Bucket, the wide-eyed naif who’s about to inherit his enterprise, of a mythical creature: “Don’t forget what happened to the man who suddenly got everything he always wanted.” What happened to him? “He lived happily ever after,” Wilder-as-Wonka says, bringing the boy into his arms for a hug.
For a decade and a half, the Toronto singer and songwriter Abel Tesfaye — d.b.a .The Weeknd — has explored the flip side of that feel-good story in sometimes-excruciating depth. The Weeknd’s music, from his atmospherics-drenched mixtapes that launched his career to the pop gems that propelled him to the Super Bowl stage in 2021, has dug deeply into 21st-century hedonism and its ill effects, with Tesfaye’s nimble falsetto singing from an omniscient point of view that takes in the predators, prey, and onlookers of his rarefied surroundings. (Sometimes, they’re even the same person.)
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Hurry Up Tomorrow, the Weeknd’s sixth full-length, finds Tesfaye — and a slew of collaborators including disco godfather Giorgio Moroder, pop abstractionist Daniel Lopatin, and fellow 21st-century doomsayerLana Del Rey — coming to terms with his recent past in a way that suggests the final-album talk surrounding it might be true. Clocking in at nearly 90 minutes, the 22-track Hurry Up Tomorrow is by turns dazzling and frustrating, with moments of lyrical clarity and sonic density that stand out amidst the heavy-hearted reflections and even heavier synths.
“All I have is my legacy/ I’ve been losing my legacy,” Tesfaye wails at the outset of Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s opener “Wake Me Up,” which is drenched in synthesized strings and choirs that add a cathedral-like drama to the proceedings at its outset; they eventually spin up into the serpentine rhythm track of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” making explicit both the musical comparisons that have followed Tesfaye and the idea that his career is, in fact, a cautionary tale about music-business success and excess.
The album’s moment of true darkness comes early on with “I Can’t Fucking Sing,” a short interlude that flashes back to the 2022 concert at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium where he lost his voice, necessitating the show’s cancellation. It’s wrenching and horrific, a high low point of a work that dives deep into the muck of success; at certain points, like the worried voicemail from XO stablemate Chxrry22 that punctuates the spectral “Reflections Laughing,” it’s compellingly human, but at other times it comes off like the plaints of someone sitting on a throne that might be too gilded.
Credit is due to the pop savvy Tesfaye has accrued over the years, and the crack team of songwriters and producers he’s assembled, for the more resplendent moments of Hurry Up Tomorrow. The Brazilian electro-funk thrash “S?o Paulo,” which follows the retelling of the SoFi incident, is so immersive as to be claustrophobic, its relentless beat feeling like the sheer panic induced by its prior incidents. “Open Hearts,” a collaboration with pop surgeons Max Martin and Oscar Holter, is a refracted New Romantic cut with a muscular synth at its root, with Tesfaye plumbing the lower depths of his range in stirring fashion. “I Can’t Wait To Get There” places classic R&B balladry into the 21st century’s harsher light, its feather-light chorus beckoning toward a world beyond the sick, sad one where The Weeknd resides. And “Drive” is resplendent and escapist, with the release Tesfaye longs for feeling almost within reach amidst its plush synths.
Hurry Up Tomorrow closes with its title track, during which Tesfaye’s sins flash before his eyes and he utters his deathbed penance: “I promise I’m sorry/ But now I’m drownin’ in the same tub where I learned how to swim/ With my mother trying to save every ounce of my innocence/ I failed her like I failed myself,” he moans as synth arpeggios swirl around him, their beauty recalling the white light one walks into during their final journey into the great beyond. It might not necessarily mean the end of the Weeknd — there is, after all, the Hurry Up Tomorrow film slated for release in May, and a stadium tour looming this summer — but it could mean Tesfaye is ready to strike out on a new path in search of the ever-elusive happily ever after.
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