"High for This," the opening track from The Weeknd's coke-fueled 2011 debut mixtape, House of Balloons, can now be understood as a kind of instruction manual for the artist's new listeners. This was intoxicating music for the intoxicated, made by an unreliable and perhaps unscrupulous narrator, coaxing the listener into zonked-out rendezvous. His intentions were immediately clear but slyly broached, a sensation enhanced by the literal facelessness of his few early press photos. He was a seedy but charismatic figure, alluring in his unknowability, in a way that felt pointedly at odds with the other Torontonian who had just hit the big time. As Drake descended on America, peddling the good-guy earnestness of his So Far Gone era, The Weeknd performed a dispassionate chicanery. "You don't know what's in store," he cooed. In the big picture, that sentiment proved even truer. Over the last 15 years, The Weeknd has led one of the stranger careers in pop history, ascending from backroom enigma to Starboy to halftime headliner. In that time, Abel Tesfaye, the singer behind The Weeknd, has grappled with how best to square his own icon ambitions with the incognito persona's duplicity.
The new Weeknd album, Hurry Up Tomorrow, is pegged as his last — or, as he put it to Variety, the end of his existence as The Weeknd, an entity saddled with a lifetime's worth of baggage. "It's a headspace I've gotta get into that I just don't have any more desire for," he said last month. "Once you understand who I am too much, then it's time to pivot." Maximalist and messy, the album is a fitting send-off for pop music's premier sleaze, who has spent his most recent trilogy carefully dissecting his ongoing bit and the route to his perch as a supreme A-lister. "All I have is my legacy," he sings in the opening seconds, "I been losing my memory / No afterlife, no other side / I'm all alone when it fades to black." It's a fascinating bit of autofiction, in which a decorated narcissist and self-proclaimed manipulator realizes no vice can soothe his simmering self-loathing. This recognition comes with a karmic judgement self-imposed by the creator, as — spoiler alert — the anti-hero within these songs dies, leaving only questions about the legacy of the alter-ego and the promised resurrection of its performer.
In connecting the dots that brought us to this threshold moment, it's tempting to think of "Can't Feel My Face," the Max Martin-produced 2015 megahit, as a line of demarcation in The Weeknd's career — the turnstile between shadowy puppeteer and emergent pop star. Swinging through retro-modern disco grooves with his sights on Michael Jackson's gilded throne, he seemed to be transitioning from if-you-know-you-know oddity to known commodity in real time. And yet, even after Tesfaye's face became famous, The Weeknd continued to make his home in shadow. So much of his performance is predicated on the idea that you can't see all of him, that you don't really need to to know what he's after. In many songs, appetite is the real main character: When he's drunk, that's the real him, a villian in his city, and he's sellin' dreams to these girls with their guard down. Early attempts to define him through genre were flimsy, as he was mistakenly lumped into the non-category "PBR&B" alongside Frank Ocean, Solange, Janelle Monaé and other groove-savvy acts embraced by lovers of indie rock. "The only thing R&B about my s*** is the style of singing," he told Complex in 2013, during his first-ever interview. "The production is very cinematic for me, and R&B was never cinematic like that." Over the years, he has moved deliberately along that axis — from sampling dream pop to working with Daft Punk, Giorgio Moroder and Oneohtrix Point Never (all of whom score films) — toward a big-budget, form-fitted version of his dirtbag blues that uses R&B as misdirection, a means for a beast of prey to disguise his intentions as sweet nothings.
Tesfaye might have been content to play in his creation's personal Sodom forever, were it not for the rise of streaming and its effects on the acts of listening and discovery. The fully anonymous character he performed in the early 2010s, as his mixtapes proliferated across blogs and onto hard drives, was a man for his time, suited to a market that still forced listeners to plumb remote corners of the internet to find the music that interested them. Algorithmic programming required a shift in thinking for everyone, not least a pop artist using darkness as cover for a tantalizing but sinister roleplay. Moreover, melodic rappers began storming the Top 40, making the foul-mouthed crooner less of a one-of-one proposition. And so, around 2016, as visibility became key to listenership, Tesfaye changed tactics, following the fork in the road toward Neverland Ranch.
The pivot worked, turning The Weeknd into an edgy manifestation of pop's baser instincts. But exposing the vampiric character to the light came with complications. By the end of the decade, the zeitgeist was shifting toward a parasocial interpretation of art, one where it was much harder to distinguish the meta from the confessional, and much easier to conflate the character with the man himself. As dialogue about other monstrous men and their work grew louder and more diffuse in tandem with his own rising profile, that conflation became taxing, forcing a subtle but noticeable reevaluation across his most recent albums. Villainy is a tougher sell these days, especially for characters who never face any consequences.
If The Weeknd's arc charts a conscience-less megalomaniac's slow descent into a stinging self-awareness, then Hurry Up Tomorrow is of two minds about just what to make of the character's mythos. "Baptized in Fear" points to a man filled with regrets, terrorized by his many sins, while "Timeless" suggests that his great works will speak for him in his absence. Maybe those thoughts aren't mutually exclusive, but as the album goes on, there is a sense that the cost of that work may be greater than its rewards. On "Take Me Back to LA," The Weeknd laments lost innocence as the penalty for an unabating, ruthless pursuit of fame and pleasure. "I left too young," he sings of his native Toronto. "Take me back to a time / The trophies that I had would still shine / Now I have nothing real left / I want my soul." Overstaying his welcome has left him a paranoid cynic, the idealized show business of his dreams now decisively out of reach.
Though Los Angeles has been the site of some recent career highlights — he recorded his 2023 live album there, and ended a Grammy boycott to perform in this month's ceremony at the Crypto.com arena — you could also call it the place where The Weeknd, as an identity, first faced real crisis. It was during a concert at Inglewood's SoFi Stadium that he lost his voice performing in 2022, ending the show after only a few songs. (He told W magazine that he believes he forgot how to sing while slipping out of the character to perform another: Tedros, the cult-leading nightclub owner from his short-lived HBO pop drama, The Idol.) Throughout the new album, this low point is the catalyzing event for a rare bit of self-reflection, causing Abel Tesfaye to reimagine The Weeknd as a self-defeating fatalist, tormented in his final moments by the afterimages of those he's wronged.
LA has long been an unholy mecca in his songs. Getting there was the mission from the beginning, as expressed in the House of Balloons cut "The Morning." In his duets with Lana Del Rey, lust and addiction loom under the glow of the Hollywood sign, while in Starboy's "Ordinary Life," he speeds toward an untimely death like James Dean: "Valhalla's where all the righteous are led / Mulholland's where all the damned will be kept." There are also, of course, "The Hills," a tour of the numbed hedonism of the palatial estates, and "Escape from LA," which is less John Carpenter dystopia and more Potemkin village overrun with sirens: "This place will be the end of me," he sings in a cold, knowing falsetto. Hurry Up Tomorrow, then, serves as his chance to play that demise out to its imagined conclusion. On the Future-assisted "Enjoy the Show," The Weeknd sings of his "curtain call" and overdosing at his peak, pointing to the superstar flameout as fodder for the tabloid industrial complex. As the album builds, it reveals an obsession with the spectacle of self-destruction, making the attention economy out as a searing-hot magnifying glass: "You know I love autonomy / 'Cause fame is a disease," he sings on "Drive." And as Future vocalizes on "Given Up on Me," The Weeknd presents himself as a lost cause — unreliable, in too deep, always wasted, lying to our faces. "Why won't you let me die?" they scream out in unison, but only one seems captive to the identity he's constructed for himself.
Future and The Weeknd have become brothers in degeneracy over the years, but they appear to be on different emotional paths now. The former has enough toxic energy to power every gentlemen's club in the Western hemisphere, while the latter's resolve has faded as a quicksand of conscience overtakes him. Perhaps that's why it felt appropriate for him to not merely pursue life beyond The Weeknd, but to kill it — to excise this exciting and mysterious and occasionally malevolent presence inside of him and be reborn. There's a moment on "Enjoy the Show" where he makes a revealing admission: "Traumas in my life, I've been hesitant to heal 'em / Take another hit, or my music, they won't feel it." It's here that the flaw in the design becomes apparent: The traumas of his life have gone largely unaddressed in his music, by nature of a character dependent on highs to sustain feeling. When he adds, "I'm stuck in a cycle, just wanna feel life from the morning / I should've been sober, but I can't afford to be boring" on "Without a Warning," the weariness lingers. The natural release from this cycle is ruin, but ego won't allow it. Trapped in his penthouse prison, the only escape left is a ritual sacrifice.
If this is truly the end of The Weeknd, I will remember it as a sort of social experiment: A sensualist experiences an endless night and comes to gradually realize there is more to life than gratification, that true companionship requires reciprocity. The timing of this move doesn't feel coincidental. Beyond his particular debauchery losing its novelty in pop — outside of the many aforementioned melodic rappers flooding the zone, look to guys like Brent Faiyaz and Bryson Tiller, R&B singers well-versed in hip-hop, who have found their niche as mesmerizing toxic boyfriends stopping just short of debasement — the space has prioritized an autobiographical form in recent years; see Taylor, or Beyoncé, or Billie, or Charli, or Sabrina, or anyone else in striking distance. Fandoms want to feel like they know their stars, not engage with an avatar. The further you stretch a persona, the more it falls apart, and in the social media age, no one is fully under the spell anymore.
By the same token, divesting from a known quantity that people like bears its own risks. It's a big ask of an audience to give up on the thing we've invested in and follow an artist someplace entirely new, especially when we've never had much sense of who the artist is outside of his art. It's hard to imagine Abel doing anything other than The Weeknd; that must be part of the dilemma that brought him here, and that's why killing him at his peak may ultimately prove to be the astute choice. It has been an exhilarating ride, to be sure, but the thing about a high is that it can never last.
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