Hurry Up Tomorrow reveals off his versatility, oscillating between the murky, muddy soundscape that outlined his first Trilogy and the gleaming disco-flecked pop that has buoyed his previous couple of releases. He stuffs the album with surprises: We get each the gloriously sludgy “Reflections Laughing,” with Travis Scott’s pitched-down vocals echoing by way of the void, and the neon buzz when Justice crash into “Wake Me Up.” However the album achieves actual drama when entropy kicks in: when Lana Del Rey’s vocals ricochet and reverberate on the finish of “The Abyss,” when the frictive interlude “Till We’re Pores and skin and Bones” hurtles into warp pace, when “Sao Paolo” spins out right into a dancefloor panic assault. Hurry Up Tomorrow at all times looks as if it’s about to lurch out of your grasp. The vertigo is the fun.
At 84 minutes, the album is undeniably bloated, nevertheless it fees ahead partly as a result of the transitions glide so seamlessly from one observe to the following. Credit score Oneohtrix Level By no means—who returns from his work on 2022’s Daybreak FM and 2020’s After Hours—and Mike Dean—who returns from his work on 2023’s flummoxing music to HBO’s The Idol—as co-producers to reinforce and sharpen each second of the synth and drum programming. Their contact, together with a coterie of different A-list producers and songwriters, make the entire album sound prepared for an IMAX theater. No marvel Tesfaye is starring in a feature-length thriller popping out in Could tied to the album, additionally known as Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Whereas what occurs within the prolonged universe stays to be seen, the album itself is most profitable when he steps away from litigating how terrible it’s to be well-known. He manufacturers himself a sinner and retains reminding himself he’s 34 now, sufficiently old to lose his tolerance and fear about medication revving up his coronary heart—sufficiently old, supposedly, to have brittle bones, as he claims on the grandiose “With out a Warning.” “I ought to have been sober, however I can’t afford to be boring,” he sings—a startlingly clear evaluation from the person who as soon as chanted, “After I’m fucked up, that’s the true me.” That self-awareness shines by way of “Benefit from the Present,” the album’s emotional centerpiece. “I simply wish to die after I’m at my fuckin’ peak,” he coos. He research himself from a distance: his face bloated within the 3 a.m. mild, tweaking “like a middle-aged baby star,” and by the point Future is available in to gurgle, “I can’t really feel my face anymore,” the callback of all callbacks, each males sound anguished. The observe is a religious successor to “Inform Your Associates,” an underrated spotlight from Magnificence Behind the Insanity—on each songs, the Weeknd collapses himself down to only how little he can supply anybody else. He’s an anecdote for the group chat, a fleeting spectacle, a haggard reflection glinting off a glass desk.
It’s that readability that leads the Weeknd into his last act: apologizing. “I hope my confession is sufficient,” he begs on the closing observe as a power-ballad piano line builds beneath him—however the music slips cleanly into the opening seconds of “Excessive for This,” the primary observe from Home of Balloons, the opening chapter of his first Trilogy. All that mechanical repentance, all the frilly methods he’s promised to maneuver on, imply nothing when the cycle begins again up. The Weeknd has at all times introduced annihilation as a form of benediction, self-destruction as essentially the most legible impulse. An object in movement stays in movement; a “Social gathering Monster” stays on the celebration; a person who constructed a complete album a few gradual drive by way of purgatory pleads for heaven after which winds up precisely the place he began: dead-eyed within the clammy darkish, ready for one more evening to start.
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