The Weeknd - HURRY UP TOMMORW 

 

In my opinion the weekend might be the most misunderstood artist currently working. There are people that are exclusively focus on his hit making potential, there are people criticising him for being superficial and toxic and there are people loving him for that.

To me he always was something else. Ever since his first mistake, I read the weeknd as a cautionary tale about the superficial party ascetics of the 2000s and the early 2010s. There always was this superficial focus on drugs, parties and sex as a way to achieve a higher social class. Able Tesafay, the artist behind The Weeknd, was a person living that lifestyle before he succeeded in music. He was homeless, addicted and living everything but a good life. 

In interviews he claimed to have let this lifestyle behind him, but is still drawing from that time as a source of inspiration. 

If you ask me most of the same Albums basically tell the same story: The weekend is living like a Rockstar driven by drugs and sex, he feels empty, finds a woman, trys to fill the void with her, but the short term gratification of drugs and sex, as well as jealousy and pride are destroying this relationship, leaving him more broken and empty than he entered the relationships.

To be fair, it is a little repetitive, if you listen to his discography back to back, but also he constantly brought in new sounds and perspective, to tell this story in new ways. Yet at some Point Able himself must have realised, that it was time to move on, wich brings us to this very album. Hurry up Tomorrow is not only conceptualised as the end of the “Trilogy” this Album forms together with his previous entries After Hours and Dawn fm, but also meant as being his final Project released under the stage name The Weeknd.

I know that is a lot of preenup before even talking about the Album, but having listened a couple of times and also talking about the expectations going into it, I fear this was all necessary context to understand, what Hurry up Tomorrow is in the grand scheme of things: It is a closing chapter, a farewell to a decade long Era for one of the biggest artists working today. It's his most ambitious project so far, spanning a total of 1h 24 minutes and 22 tracks. The sounds feel orchestral, like a synth opera, at times, while also paying homage to his whole discography. Given the delays, the concert last year and all the changes in between, I can't help but feel like The Weeknd really wanted to make sure that his farewell project was exactly the statement he wanted it to be remembered as. 

While I am still in the process of really understanding the project in it's entirety I already am Pretty sure he in Fact succeeded. It was not fully what I was expecting: After Hours and Dawn fm set the character up to die from the struggles he always sang about, establishing the idea to confront The Weeknd with a sort of Afterlife, however this project makes it clear in the first song, that there is no Afterlife and The Weeknd is very much still alive, the album is still about him doing drugs and having sex. Is there regret? Yes, but I would consider Regret as crucial to The Weeknd ascetic. Its is about regretting, but then doing it again.

In the end there may or may not even be a loop into his very first track High for this. I would like the idea. It is like The Weeknd is not being allowed to break the cycle before Able leaves him in the past. He just is not meant to learn from his mistakes.  What is Able trying to tell us by that? Maybe growth and recovery is not a linear journey, but a constant cycle of trying and failing to be the best version of yourself. Or just how the Weeknd always was a dark critic of the “Rockstar-Culture” . This last project knows that the culture won't end with it. There definitely is ground for interpretation. And I really like the read of Able preparing us to let The Weeknd die and his final message is the Weeknd won't die as a consequence of his own mistakes, but he dies when we move on from him.

 

At this point I would like to leave it there for now. HURRY UP TOMORROW is a magnum opus by the definition of the word it's grand it considers the complete ouvre leading up to itself, commentating on itself, while not forgetting to give us a complex and diverse soundscape along the way.

 

Short: The Weeknd might just have closed his discography with his MAGNUM OPUS.