REVIEW: On ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow,’ the party is over when the Weeknd says it is

In this young century, no artist has had a better grip on the intertwined duality of the party and the after-party, and how the promise of night curdles in the daylight, than the Weeknd. He’s known his turf since the beginning, when he emerged, anonymously, with a woozy-spooky-sleazy mixtape back in 2011.

“House of Balloons” served as a blueprint for the artist’s milieu for the next decade-plus: pills, powders and Alizé for breakfast; money as motivation; a thirst for sex masked as a search for love. But even then, the Weeknd knew the lost weekend would eventually end. “The higher that I climb,” the artist born Abel Tesfaye sang, “The harder Imma drop.”

As the Weeknd, Tesfaye has gone (and perhaps, gotten) as high as a pop star can get: a handful of No. 1 albums, four Grammys, a stadium tour, the Super Bowl halftime show, 27 songs with a billion streams on Spotify. Which means that the drop he prophesied could be one of Icarian proportions.

To sidestep that fate, Tesfaye is retiring the Weeknd moniker with his sixth album, “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” and is going out on his own terms: with a synth epic that sets the stage for an eponymous film that marks his feature-length debut as an actor. “Don’t overstay at the party,” he told Variety. “When is the right time to leave, if not at your peak?”

The Weeknd’s last album, “Dawn FM,” was imagined as a radio station playing on the way to purgatory. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” picks up where that one left off, but the Weeknd has bad news: There’s no afterlife, no other side, just legacy and dust. What follows is Tesfaye looking back on his career so far – and the life and death of his musical persona – before exiting stage left.

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Despite its title, “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is in no rush. The album’s 80-plus minutes are a victory lap, and the Weeknd and his collaborators are at the peak of their powers. The MJ-like vibrato that made Tesfaye an unlikely pop star is intact, and frequent production partner Oneohtrix Point Never feels present in every synthesizer squeal, providing connective tissue across the 22-track behemoth.

The album opens with “Wake Me Up” and never goes back to sleep, even if it threatens to during the back half. The electro-orchestral grandeur of the first song finds the Weeknd deep in his bag, interpolating “Thriller,” sampling “Scarface” and collaborating with Justice and Johnny Jewel. The synthesizers are pushed to the limit throughout, acting as liquid swords on “Cry for Me,” powering a hydraulic dirge on “Baptized in Fear,” invoking trance ecstasy on “Open Hearts” and overwhelming the senses on “Red Terror.”

The Weekend and his collaborators have innovated a style of electronic R&B since the very beginning, and “Hurry Up Tomorrow” is malleable enough to showcase all Tesfaye’s interests, from warped acoustic balladry (“Reflections Laughing”) to sun-melted elasti-soul (“I Can’t Wait To Get There”). There’s even a detour into bludgeoning funk carioca (“S?o Paulo”) and a rap-R&B hybrid that finds collaborator Future in peak form: an addict of love and other drugs (“Enjoy the Show”).

Lyrically, the Weekend documents the tolls of a life on the road and on the stage, crying “whiskey tears” from his “penthouse prison.” He seems to have a healthier rapport with love and relationships now, at least compared with his “Kiss Land” nadir. But mostly, the album is a late-night-early-morning introspection of what will be left when the curtain closes on this chapter of his artistic life.

Tesfaye understands that the darkness of the Weeknd’s world has been a backdrop for his illumination as a star; healing his traumas ends the act. What’s the Weeknd without drugs, debauchery and despair?

Never one for half-measures, Tesfaye contemplates the end of his moniker by quoting Henry Scott-Holland’s poem “Death Is Nothing at All,” begging his audience, “Call me by the old, familiar name.” Part of the poem also appears in the first trailer for the album’s eponymous film – the “next room” into which Tesfaye will soon slip.

The first glimpses of the movie, co-starring Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan and directed by Trey Edward Shults (“It Comes At Night”), suggest that Tesfaye is playing a stylized version of himself/the Weeknd, with limo rides and glitzy mansions giving way to gasoline fires and killer clowns. The fate of the protagonist looks grim, but Tesfaye knows that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, so it’s best to celebrate the Weeknd today.