The Weeknd Review, hurry tomorrow: A spectacular last chapter in his after hour trilogy

On By Littum

“Everything I have is my legacy,” Singing Abel Tesfaye over the Funereal opening bars in “Wake Me Up”. It is a stage-setting moment for what it will soon emerge is the Canadian artist’s most ambitious project for the date-feature film-length album, which allegedly acts as the last chapter for his enigmatic altar-ego The Weeknd. Later in the year he plays the opposite Wednesday Actor Jenna Ortega and SaltburnBarry Keoghan in an actual feature film inspired by this record – a psychological thriller supported by his restless, scattered score.

Tesfaye is a noted Cinephile and has always incorporated film influences into his work. His debut album, 2013’s cultural change Kiss LandTapped on the kind of jittery, threatening paranoia that instructors like John Carpenter or David Cronenberg made their phone cards. Hurry up tomorrow ‘S predecessor, 2022’s Dawn FMvervet Jim Carrey as an eerie radio host and borrowed tagline from 1987’s Less than zero (“It only looks like the good life”) For his tracks of the same name.

Hurry up tomorrowHowever, the first album of Tesfayes is actually feels As a movie, scored by his trademark Maelstrom of Electronic and R&B. The third and final rate of his after-hours “trilogy”, it has supporting characters (Brazilian superstar Anitta, Florence and The Machine, Rappers Future, Travis Scott and Playboi Carti), Props (the sudden ring of a phone and ice shell a whiskey glass on “Reflections Laughing”) and a arch that throws Tesfaye in its favorite role: the furious, mysterious anti -hero.

34-year-olds have previously hinted Hurry up tomorrow Was partly inspired by a traumatic incident that took place in 2022., which came on stage in Inglewood, California, he shouted to the crowd: “Hi, Los Angeles!” His voice broke. When Tesfaye tried to sing his next line, nothing came out. Recordings of the moment show the stunned artist who looked close to tears as his fans broke out in their own howl of dismay. The show was canceled. These screams can be heard here in the transition from a short intervals (“I can’t f *** ing sing”) Into the doming “São Paulo”, probably inspired by last year’s triumphant live-streamed stadium show in Brazil.

Half of the time you don’t know if Tesfaye sings to a lover or personifies his difficult relationship with fame, the cruel mistress. “Are you real, or are you illusion?/ Because I feel your love is my delusion,” he asks on “Wake Me Up” as “Reflections laugh”, refer to the pressure on my shoulders: “I don’t want to do that.

Although Tesfaye was born and raised in the Toronto suburb of her mother and grandmother, Tesfaye has always seemed magnetized by the dark way of Los Angeles – its hypocrisies, its vanity, its strangeness. He delayed the album’s release because of the recent fires, with revenue from the track “Take Me Back to La”, which goes against a charity providing relief to the affected.

That song nods again to the convicted Inglewood show (“My voice cracks when we scream”). It is certainly conscious that his voice with its Michael Jackson-influenced Melisma is on its most agile. Meanwhile, it seems that Tesfaye is longing for these house with balloon days releasing blends from a place of anonymity: “Take me back to a place/ where the snow would fall on my face/ and I miss my city lights/ I left for young. “

Transitions here are remarkable; To jump over a single track feels akin to jumping three chapters in a novel. The Giorgio Morod-Debted Synths of “Take me back to LA” melts in, yes … Giorgio Moroder on the synths for “Big Sleep”. Tesfaye pushes the pedal down on “Drive” and sends himself falling into “The Abyss”, a decorated flurry of Glissando Piano notes that it falls like the snow from his beloved Toronto. Rinse out and you risk missing out on a surprising como, from Lana del Rey’s spectral cries to the beautiful sample of Nina Simone’s “Wild Is The Wind” on “Given up on Me”.

It would be easy to reject this album as an overbearing – especially after Tesfaye gave all the collective ICK in HBO’s ridiculous misfire of a series Idolet – but Hurry up tomorrow is impressive for its ambition alone. So many pop stars in Tesfaye’s multi-billion streaming, Grammy-winning, stadium-selling position would have tried to place fans with an album filled with finished hits.

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“Fame is a disease,” he declares “drives” after he previously confessed, “I just want to die when I’m on my f *** ing.” By the title track that closes the album on brighter (still four -coded) piano chords, he sounds loose: “So burn me with your light/ I have no more matches left to win.” Then offers a really surprising moment when Tesfaye offers the most personal lyrics in his career to date: “I took so much more than their lives/ they took a piece of me/ and I have tried to fill the void that my dad left / So no one else gives up on me, I’m sorry. “If this really is the last weeknd album, you could hardly hope for a better finale. Roll credits.