When the Weeknd released his last album, 2022’s Dawn FM, it carried a certain sense of finality. A grand concept album filled with both starry and august special guests – Jim Carrey, Quincy Jones, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston – and intimations of death, apocalypse and the afterlife, it was accompanied by interviews in which Abel Tesfaye talked if not of retiring, then of retiring the Weeknd, the sleazy, troubled persona he’s inhabited since the release of his debut mixtape. He wanted, he said, “to remove the Weeknd from the world”.
As it turned out, he wasn’t quite done yet, although he may conceivably be soon. Dawn FM was revealed to be the second in a trilogy of albums that began with 2020s’s After Hours, and Dancing in the Flames, the first single taken from part three – Hurry Up Tomorrow, which has been teased for the last nine months, and received a further publicity boost via a spectacular livestreamed Weeknd gig in São Paolo last week – suggests his outlook hasn’t much improved.
The themes of death and apocalypse are once more much in evidence. “Traffic dies while we are racing home / Melted lights cover the open road”, opens Dancing in the Flames, its lyrics reminiscent of celebrated songs in a similar vein. As on David Bowie’s Five Years, with its weeping newsreader informing the world of its poor prognosis, the media aren’t much inclined to optimism – “‘The world can’t heal’, they say on the radio” – and if it’s a bit pretentious to describe the lines about vehicular suicide as Ballardian, they’re definitely a little reminiscent of the Smiths’ There Is a Light That Never Goes Out: “I can’t wait to see your face crash when we’re switching lanes … if I miss the brake we’re dancing in the flames … the fire’s raging but you’re still beautiful and it’s amazing.”
All this is set to incongruously bright-hued and synth-fuelled music that leans ever more heavily into the 80s pop obsession that’s lurked around the Weeknd’s sound from the start, but which really came to the fore on 2020’s record-breaking single Blinding Lights. Indeed, with the sound of Blinding Lights still casting a shadow over pop – four years on, people are still making records in its image – there’s the sense that Tesfaye and producers Max Martin and Oscar Holter have been forced to seek out fresh sounds to borrow from their favoured decade. It’s a very long time indeed since pop music deployed the kind of booming theme from Miami Vice drums that appear 26 seconds into Dancing in the Flames: a regular feature in 80s pop that’s thus far avoided the attentions of 21st-century revivalists.
Its melody isn’t quite as maddeningly catchy as Blinding Lights, but Dancing in the Flames nevertheless feels like a hit waiting to happen. What it doesn’t really resemble is Tesfaye’s description of the sound of Hurry Up Tomorrow as “Frankenstein”, which implies the stitching together of disparate influences: Dancing in the Flames is very much intent on sounding like something you would have encountered on MTV in 1985.
Then again, Dawn FM was an album that stylistically leapt around, from wracked ballads to grinding electro to tracks that bore the influence of Barry White or T Rex, so perhaps he’s referring to a similar eclecticism around the album as a whole. When we’ll find out isn’t entirely clear: the campaign around Hurry Up Tomorrow is clearly gathering pace, but as yet no release date has been announced. Nor do we know what the future holds for Tesfaye or the Weeknd after it does come out: he’s talked on social media about “facing the abyss” and, in an impressively vague interview with Billboard offered an equivocal “I think about giving up every day, but I also find purpose every day”. We shall see.
