THE WEEKND - Hurry Up Tomorrow

All I have is my legacy

I been losing my memory

No afterlife, no other side

I’m all alone when it fades to black

A meditation on death opens "Hurry Up Tomorrow". Yes, exactly that. It's no joke, and Abel, on "Wake Me Up", alongside Justice, Oneohtrix Point Never and the ever-present Mike Dean — who seems to be behind the boards pretty much everywhere here — really is singing about nothingness, darkness and memories. And to drive the point home, he even throws in a sample from the intro of "Main Title" by Giorgio Moroder, from the Scarface soundtrack, and shortly after, just to make sure nothing's missing from his calling card, he adds a drop of Thriller by Michael Jackson, dropped into the opening seconds of the following "Cry for Me", complete with a Diplo-style beat also recently borrowed by a neomelodic singer from Naples.

The unprecedented opening thought Tesfaye develops here is obviously tied to the SoFi Stadium incident. An event the musician, understandably, will never be able to forget, since during "Alone Again" his voice began to crack, eventually forcing him to stop the show amid boos.

So it couldn't have kicked off in a more overused way, at least musically speaking, this third chapter of the trilogy that includes "After Hours" and "Dawn FM". In short: mannerism is dead, long live mannerism!, as Tesfaye's fans might be tempted to shout, given that he's also been going around lately saying he wants to close the book on The Weeknd project with this very record. So bring on the same old tired urges the Canadian pop singer-songwriter has been chasing for the past decade. Call it a self-referential postcard spread across all twenty-two tracks of an album that's as crowd-pleasing as it is, frankly, way too long, overall quality notwithstanding. Starting with the parallels to the King of Pop, as they called him in the '90s, recycled in every possible way across a good half of this record too.

The opening of this new electro-soul showcase, all filtered little vocals and synth-funk beats depending on the moment, is a syrupy one-two punch: "São Paulo", sung as a duet with Anitta and premiered on Instagram for the NFL Brazil event on September 6, 2024, does even worse — oops, better — given the moombahton pirouette it stages and then dismantles with a spot-on shift in rhythm, however tacky it still is.

Between one video-game-like interlude and another, things move along briskly enough. In the glossy existentialist ballad "Baptized In Fear", Lopatin resurfaces again, useful here and there like a rug salesman, while "Open Heart" brings back a touch of french touch, part Daft Punk-and-Justice, part Kavinsky cruising in his Testarossa, with a spot-on refrain that lodges itself instantly in your head and under your skin, plus a crackling bass that never hurts. Reflections — this time of insecurity — come crashing in (gently) on the lumbering "Reflections Laughing", with Travis Scott stepping in on the second verse to claim he knows the fire and the falseness of this world, drawing a smile even from some random pet.

This first turning point reveals an album that's well produced as usual, nicely paced, but with a bit of dust in the drawer. Then "Enjoy the Show" comes along, with Future guesting on the bridge, suggesting where old Abel is actually at his best right now in his career — namely among lopsided arrangements, in dreams quickly forgotten by morning, and, naturally, in soulful territory shaped his own way, yet emotionally floating somewhere between the dazed zigzags of Minnie Riperton and Erykah Badu.

There are plenty of samples, and it would honestly be tedious to list them all. The best are the ones from "Wild Is the Wind" by Nina Simone and "On the Way" by the Chicago Gangsters, dropped into the middle of "Given Up On Me" without warning — which always works well.

"I Can't Wait To Get There", the track that leans most toward Thundercat, further confirms what's just been said: that Abel, now more than ever, is at his best when he stops trying to be Michael having dinner with Prince. The synth interplay of "Timeless", with Playboi Carti stealing the spotlight, works quite well too, buoyed by the excellent production from Pharrell Williams, Ojivolta, Mike Dean and Twisco.

The second half of "Hurry Up Tomorrow" is decidedly less bombastic and raises the bar, even in eighties-leaning moments like "Take Me Back to La" and "Big Sleep". Or in the ultra-romantic piano melody of "The Abyss", dedicated to his partner Sim Khadra and featuring a very welcome cameo from his friend Lana Del Rey.

In "Red Terror", the divorce of his separated parents resurfaces too, before Abel covers the title track "In Heaven (Lady In The Radiator Song)" by David Lynch, a song that the recently departed American director wrote with Peter Ivers of Eraserhead. A tribute that elevates everything in the closing stretch of a good, if uneven, work, marked by a turn at the halfway point that tells us Abel still has the wind at his back and is ready to kill off The Weeknd in order to perhaps better take possession of himself and finally abandon, after plenty of worthwhile albums and singles, the moonwalker-style mannerism that, on paper, can still work here and there (fair enough), but which at a certain point starts to really reek.

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01/02/2025