Is Hurry Up Tomorrow really the end of The Weeknd as we know him?
The conclusion of The Weeknd’s second trilogy is a beautiful but repetitive eulogy that brings his career full circle.
If you’ve had a pulse over the last decade, you’ve heard a few songs by The Weeknd.
The three drugged-out mixtapes—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence, later packaged as Trilogy—that jump-started The Weeknd’s career back in 2011 birthed a moodier, more mysterious branch of modern R&B. Take House of Balloons. One listen through that tape, and you’ll think The Weeknd is a terrible person. He knows it too, and he spends a lot of time reveling in the debauchery, as much its victim as he was its orchestrator. The lyrics are tortured, and the atmosphere clouding them is even more haunting. His more recent output sounds a lot cleaner. He’s gotten cleaner too, after admitting that heavy drug use was a crutch early in his career. Now, he makes music capable of mass appeal to casual listeners while still fighting similar demons. The most infamous examples of this are “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Blinding Lights,” songs about cocaine and drunk driving, getting nominated for Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards; he even poked fun at the first nomination on “Reminder” (“I just won a new award for a kids show/Talking 'bout a face numbing off a bag of blow”). He knows what he’s doing.
The Weeknd has heavily teased another trilogy over the course of this decade, and 2025’s Hurry Up Tomorrow is the payoff after After Hours in 2020 and Dawn FM in 2022. After Hours was one of the biggest (and best) albums of the pandemic era: “Blinding Lights” was crowned the most successful song of all time according to Billboard; the “Save Your Tears” remix with Ariana Grande was another chapter in that duo’s run of successful collabs; and Abel delivered a solo Super Bowl halftime performance in 2021, an achievement placing him in a very exclusive club of global superstars. He followed that up with the less-impressive Dawn FM in 2022, tackling many of the same themes around love, fame, and his own mortality. This second entry leaned farther into The Weeknd’s trademark mixture of pristine pop and R&B stylings with dark lyrics beneath the surface. “Out Of Time” and “Less Than Zero” are career highlights, while a loose concept bolstered by radio interludes from Jim Carrey flesh out a narrative biography for the character of The Weeknd. He turns up the heat again on Hurry Up Tomorrow, which somehow sounds even brighter at times but has even darker undertones, referencing the fallout from The Weeknd’s failures and flaws.
Hurry Up Tomorrow reads like a eulogy for the character we’ve spent fourteen years with. Abel said as much in a 2023 interview with W: “I still want to kill The Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.” The album is littered with references to the end–the culmination of Dawn FM’s allusions to the afterlife. He wrestles with what sounds like paralysis in purgatory on the over-polished intro “Wake Me Up,” claiming “No afterlife/No other side/I’m all alone when it fades to black.” He strikes a similar tone on “Baptized In Fear” and “Give Me Mercy,” two more cuts that major in religious regret and remorse. The Weeknd knows something is coming, but whether it’s the end of his career or his life is up to you: the lyrics “Trying to remember everything that my preacher said/Tryna right my wrongs, my rеgrets filling up my head/All the timеs I dodged death, this can't be the way it ends” are probably referring to substance abuse and other dangerous behaviors that defined his early life and career. (These days, he calls himself “sober-lite.”)
“Reflections Laughing” is an odd break in this character arc. Someone leaves a voicemail: “My girl told me she saw you in Dallas, said you didn't look good/That you barely finished the show/I just hope you're not back to the old you.” This song isn’t particularly good—the boring Travis Scott feature shoehorned in the middle didn’t help—but from a narrative perspective, it’s cool: the changes in pitch and inflection that we hear as the song progresses reflect The Weeknd’s intoxication as the night goes on. You hear him completely gone by the last chorus, and the song ends with the same voicemail asking, “What does that shit feel like anyway?” I don’t have to tell you that escapism through drug use is a heavy throughline in The Weeknd’s catalog, but it sounds like we’re back at square one, dealing with the same demons from Trilogy.
Elsewhere in the narrative, Abel is simultaneously talking to God, his fans, himself, past lovers, and this Weeknd character. Easily the most redeeming quality about HUT is all the ways you can interpret some of these lyrics. “Cry For Me,” a track that directly opposes the After Hours single “Save Your Tears,” is a great example of this. He’s talking to his fans as much as he’s talking to an unnamed lover when he croons, “I hope that I live life for a reason/But at least you'll play this song/When I'm gone.” She’ll cry for him when his life is over, just like we’ll cry for him when he retires. He does a similar thing on the addicting “Open Hearts”: “I told myself I would never get old, then you pulled me in close.” Age comes up again on “Enjoy The Show.” Directly addressing his fans, he asserts, “When the curtains call, I hopе you mourn/And if you don't, I hope you enjoy the fuckin' show,” embracing the end of this character for better or for worse. He concludes that song by claiming that “I'm ready, I'll go overdose/I don't wanna make it past thirty-four.” In real life, Abel turns 35 years old on February 16th, 2025. You do the math. My favorite moment of multivalent lyricism is on “Give Me Mercy.” He asks, “When I’m defeated/Give me mercy like you do, and forgive me like you do/Hope that you see me, when I’m depleted.” While obviously asking God for forgiveness, I wonder if he’s also asking for mercy from his fans in light of his decision to walk away, hoping that we can acknowledge how much he’s done over the course of his career.
But you get the point by now. HUT specializes in existentialism, legacy, the price of fame, and everything else celebrities usually complain about. The shiny synth pop supporting most of these lyrics is the same grandiose backdrop he’s embraced a lot in this trilogy. Indeed, throughout the 85-minute runtime, you hear The Weeknd wrestling with similar things over and over. Charitably, you might say he’s sticking to a narrative concept, reflecting on what is supposedly the end of his career as The Weeknd. It’s a victory lap album, in spite of the darkness of its content. More critically, though, it just sounds like he’s running out of shit to say. Don’t just take it from me; in that same 2023 interview with W, he admitted: “As The Weeknd, I’ve said everything I can say.” Maybe he was right. Committing so much space to being angsty about ending your career makes songs like “Timeless” and “Niagara Falls” sound even better in the context of the album because they aren’t bogged down with the same commitment to a larger concept. You could cut about a third of the HUT tracklist and the takeaway would be exactly the same. Many of these tracks sound incredible individually—if I focused on the production and vocal highlights, I could compliment almost every song—but as an overall listening experience, the subject matter grows repetitive as each track passes by. I’m not sure how much more I’ll be listening to this from top to bottom, which is an indictment of what’s supposed to be a high-concept album. This record is a touch shorter than most feature films, but The Weeknd could’ve delivered this exact same thematic package at featurette length and just walked away from the dead horse.
In any case, this chapter ends with “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a very solemn outro starring The Weeknd coming to terms with—stop me if you’ve heard this before—the terrible things he’s done and the legacy he’ll leave behind: “I have no more fights left to win/Tie me up to face it, I can't run away/I'll accept that it's the end.” Vocally impressive throughout, The Weeknd lays his desires out clear as day: “Hope my confession is enough/So I see heaven after life/I want heaven when I die.” He’s come a long way from “Glass Table Girls.” This absolutely sounds like an outro, not only to an album but to a legendary career. The cherry on top? The end of “Hurry Up Tomorrow” plays right into the intro for “High For This,” the intro to House of Balloons, the mixtape that started it all. Go back and listen to that very first song and see how different the subject matter is. You can interpret this one of two ways: either he's trying to show us how far he’s come with an easter egg for his core fans, or he’s trying to say this character won’t ever really die and that he can’t quit it. For the sake of the narrative, I hope the intended meaning is the former because the latter would render this 85-minute adventure largely null and void.
So, let’s go with the progress interpretation. The Weeknd isn’t who he used to be, no longer that irresponsible 20-something who never knew when the party was over. Now he’s ending the party. Artists tend to have a hard time actually retiring: my only ask is that he doesn’t come back with new music in two years. Especially not as The Weeknd. Even if the subject matter got redundant by the end, continuing would erase the impact of not just one album, not just two albums, but a meticulously crafted trilogy.
Favorite Tracks: “Open Hearts”; “Give Me Mercy”; “Cry For Me”; “Niagara Falls”; “Drive”
Least Favorites: “Opening Night”; “Reflections Laughing”; “Given Up On Me”; “Wake Me Up”; “São Paulo”
edited by Alex Oder.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.
