The Weeknd has announced that his forthcoming album, the last in his trilogy that began with the blockbuster "After Hours" and continued with "Dawn FM," will be titled "Hurry Up Tomorrow."
The announcement is accompanied by a dramatic and seemingly self-questioning series of statements, filled with self-referential lines from his songs, accompanied by equally dramatic symphonic music.
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"Today has felt like an endless spin," it reads. "I keep distorting the truth, immune to the dizziness, numb to the nausea. What lies beneath -- screams in silence
"i look in the mirror and feel both old and new stuck in limbo and unable to move. I still haven't faced myself...
"The very thing that once made me invincible failed me on the world stage. A new trauma surfaced.
The announcement continues, "This album represents the creative apex of the project, serving as the third and final chapter crafted with existential and self-referential themes as seen with the latest visionary teasers that have set fans ablaze with anticipation for this concluding installment."
The album, which does not yet have a release date, adds to a busy fall for the artist. On Saturday he is performing a special concert at Estádio Morumbi in São Paulo, Brazil, that will be livestreamed on YouTube. Additionally, The Weeknd will donate 10% of net proceeds from all merchandise sales at the event and online to the Brazilian Soul Fund of BrazilFoundation, supporting communities affected by natural disasters and economic hardships in southern Brazil.
He also is opening his "Halloween Horror Nights" experience at Universal Studios, titled "The Weeknd: Nightmare Trilogy," which runs from tomorrow (September 5) through November 3.
And next month, he will conclude his two-year "After Hours Til the Dawn" tour with a quartet of shows in Australia, two each in Melbourne and Sydney on October 5 and 6 and October 22 and 23.
The Weeknd launched this new chapter in July with a minute-plus-long clip, posted in his Instagram story, that combines a surreal series of dream-like images from the last four years of his musical career: There's the sports car, poker theme, red suit and sunglasses and sports car he sported in "Blinding Lights" and the other videos from his blockbuster 2020 "After Hours" album, segueing into the old man imagery from "Dawn FM," then the hooded characters featured in his "After Hours Til the Dawn" tour, and then new elements come in. There's a character, possibly a mannequin, wearing a mask that looks very much like his own face (he wore a lot of masks on the tour) and, in the conclusion, a character that looks like him as a young boy, surrounded by a horde of white mannequins reaching for him. Throughout, hazy music plays, largely synthesizers and massed Weeknd vocals, which are presumably blurry remixes of new (and possibly older) material.
The clip concludes with a ray of sunlight hitting the boy's head and spreading out as grass and flowers grow, adding up to a fairly obvious death-redemption-rebirth theme.
It actually ties together with the vague hints he gave Variety during an interview mostly about his HBO drama "The Idol" in June of 2023. Asked if there would be new music after "The Idol" and after the tour, he replied:
"I'm finishing the third part of this of this saga, of this trilogy," he said. "The name of it will come out soon, but it's not called what some fans think it's called... what they think it's called is actually a song on the album, but that's not what the actual album is called. [It's unclear which speculative title he's referring to.] So I'm just gonna say that."