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.
