The Weeknd’s fifth album was released in January
(Picture: Handout)The Weeknd’s new music video for Out of Time was released yesterday and it’s already making waves. We hear you – of course it is. Nearly everything The Weekend puts out on YouTube is a smash hit. Think Save Your Tears (782M YouTube views), Heartless (139M) and The Hills (1.8B).
But the new video is a particular gem: It looks like it’s been heavily inspired by Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation, it has Squid Games’ HoYeon Jung playing The Weeknd’s love interest, and Jim Carey – the singer’s real-life neighbour – has a – what a surprise! – wacky cameo at the end.
To set the scene, the song itself is a sort of 80s synth-pop-inspired laid-back dance track. It’s the seventh song on The Weeknd’s January-released Dawn FM which was very well-received by critics. The album has a smooth Michael Jackson feel, and is supposed to be the music playing on a retro radio station while you are stuck in traffic in a tunnel – the twist being that tunnel is purgatory.
The film begins with the camera zooming in on the entrance of a hotel. The walls around it are grey concrete, but a synthetic yellow light shines out from the door.
Then the instrumental begins. HoYeon Jung is putting on her lipstick and arranging her hair in a mirror. She always looks stunning, but given that the last time most of us saw her she was playing a starving and stressed (to put it mildly) Kang Sae-byeok in Squid Games, now she looks extra good.
Then the scene changes again as The Weeknd’s lyrics begin. He is singing karaoke, and this is when all the Lost In Translation references start to kick in. Ok, there are no pink wigs and there’s no Bill Murray in a tight yellow sports top, but there is that very specific blue hazy lighting that Coppola fans know so well. Then we move to a clip of Jung and The Weeknd at a bar and the colours are once again similar to those in Coppola’s scenes in the Park Hyatt Tokyo.
It’s all very charming – Jung and The Weeknd are really very sweet and very good looking as they run about the hotel, singing and having fun together in the lift, in the bar and in the foyer.
But then it all gets eerie - someone is following the couple down the corridor and then walks in on them dancing. Suddenly, Jung and The Weeknd’s faces start to morph. There’s blood (where did that come from?) in the ice bucket and on the restaurant table. It looks like Jung is passed out on a bed. Then the light goes blue.
As The Weeknd moves the curtain to better see the light, a hand approaches him from behind and the scene turns into a hospital surgery room. If you’ve been wondering when Carey might appear, you probably won’t be surprised to know that the fact that it’s gone from romantic indie to a Get Out horror scene appears to be his cue. He plays a weird doctor guy, and his patient could be (and probably is) The Weeknd, but we don’t get to find out.
This is the first music video in months for a song from DAWN FM that hasn’t been taken from the musician’s immersive musical Amazon Prime special. The Weeknd x The DAWN FM Experience was released in February and fans have been treated to clips of the 30-minute extravaganza on the musician’s YouTube ever since.
Like all good music videos, Out of Time is absolutely bonkers. We wouldn’t want it any other way.
