Hurry Up Tomorrow

About

On what was meant to be the last date of his 2022 tour, The Weeknd took the stage at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium, but when he opened his mouth to sing for 80,000 screaming fan, nothing came out. Over the past 14 year, Abel Tesfaye has experienced what you might call pop’s glow-up of the century: When he emerged from obscurity as the faceless voice behind 2011’s noir-ish <i>House of Balloons</i> mixtape, nobody could have guessed that he’d be headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show a decade later. But that moment onstage triggered what Tesfaye has since described as a breakdown, inspiring a period of intense reflection on his life and career—and <i>Hurry Up Tomorrow</i>, his sixth studio album. Tesfaye has called <i>Tomorrow</i> the final chapter in the trilogy he began with 2020’s <i>After Hours</i>, the album that launched him into a new stratosphere of pop succe, and continued with 2022’s high-concept <i>Dawn FM</i>. Continuing the narrative of its semi-autobiographical narrator’s journey through a dark night of the soul, <i>Tomorrow</i> doubles as an allegory about fame’s power to destroy: The curtain rise, and it’s all downhill from there. He longs for a time “when my blood never tasted like wine,” he wails over the night-drive synth-pop of “Take Me Back to LA,” and diagnoses fame as a disease on the glittering “Drive.” He’s ready to leave it all behind on “Wake Me Up,” a collaboration with French duo Justice: “No afterlife, no other side,” he sing, sounding entranced by the thought. .

via Apple Music

The Clerk says

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