“Bring your love, baby / I could bring my shame
Bring the drugs, baby / I could bring my pain”— “Wicked Games,” track 5 of “House of Balloons”
The Weeknd’s early song “Wicked Games” hinges on these lines, which provided significant direction for the following 14 years of his career. With few exceptions, this sentiment is the through line of the R&B/pop-fusion icon’s highly celebrated and streamed catalog. His toxic persona, particularly surrounding sexual relationships and drug use, has been a powerful element of his tone as an artist.
Although recent projects maintain the artist’s brand of parties and falsetto crooning, the work released by The Weeknd — born Abel Tesfaye — since the 2020 album “After Hours” seems to have taken a subtle shift. Tesfaye’s music still references relationships and drugs, but in a greater manner of self-criticism than before. Before 2020, the artist’s lyrics often reflected the issues his lifestyle caused, but this new era introduced an element of self-parody previously unseen in the catalog. Analyzing the music videos released from 2020 through 2023 illustrates this critique of his fame, fortune and debauchery.
“Hurry Up Tomorrow” — The Weeknd’s newest album — provides the most obvious step in this shift away from his earlier tone. The 22-track project grapples with darkness and suffering like his other works, but the latter half allows transparent, pensive moments to surface with songs like “I Can’t Wait To Get There,” “Take Me Back to LA” and “Hurry Up Tomorrow.” Notably, the album was announced to be Tesfaye’s final release under The Weeknd moniker, which he has toyed with doing for several years. Yet what is most interesting about the album is the direct appeal to religious themes — particularly Christian ones — in both the music and the visuals associated with it.
Like many people of faith, Christians have historically objected to their symbolism and culture being appropriated and used by outsiders like artists or companies. This is especially true when it involves commercial gain, social critique or simple disrespect. I can’t say how many times I have heard friends and family take issue with troubling celebrities wearing cross necklaces. For example, Lil Nas X’s music and promotions in the past few years have often used religious symbols and stories to provoke reactions from conservative audiences. From selling devilish blood shoes to crucifying himself with a dance party below, the pop star’s career has profited from making light of religious tradition. Naturally, people of faith are often upset with these promotions, as the music frames the tradition using a satirical lens rather than earnest artistic use from experience.
It would be easy to approach “Hurry Up Tomorrow” the same way — anticipating another secular singer mocking Christians by using the Bible for malicious purposes. Seeing as so much of Tesfaye’s career concerns partying and sexual themes, it’s not a ridiculous assumption at first. The difference is that this new album appeals to Christian sentiments very earnestly — and that Tesfaye isn’t an outsider to the faith.
As a first-generation Ethiopian-Canadian, Tesfaye was raised by his traditional Ethiopian family in Toronto, where he lived until his first tour in his 20s. During his childhood, his family members were practicing Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Christians. Despite indicating little interest in his faith by his early adulthood — evident in songs like 2011’s “Heaven or Las Vegas” — trickles of The Weeknd’s lyrics display a desire to recover from his hedonism. On “Ordinary Life” from 2016’s “Starboy,” Tesfaye laments that he will die young, stating, “Paid for the life that I chose / if I could, I’d trade it all / trade it for a halo.”
The symbolic references to Christian themes and ideas become more apparent when considering The Weeknd’s recent work. We see allusions to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” in the structures of his newest album trilogy: “After Hours,” “Dawn FM” and “Hurry Up Tomorrow” being “Inferno,” “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso” respectively. “After Hours” is filled with every kind of sin, is set in Las Vegas and the Weeknd dies by the end. “Dawn FM” frames his subsequent purgatory as being stuck in traffic and listening to the radio while coming to terms with regret and loss. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” closes the story as an ascending plea for mercy and new life while trying to shake off the demons of his past.
The same nostalgic synths that drive the hazy dance hits in “After Hours” are heavily utilized here as well, but now the intense sounds are used to illuminate brutal suffering and desperate hope. It’s grandiose, it’s intimate and it feels strangely transparent in contrast to the character of a hyperbolic pop star heard through the past two bodies of work. Songs like “Give Me Mercy” and closer title “Hurry Up Tomorrow” bear direct passions and confessions to God, all within the comfortable frame of a song to a lover. It’s hard to say how much of these messages are meant to represent a one-to-one Christian practice currently present in Tesfaye’s life, and his sparse interviews in the past few years offer minimal insight into the artist’s personal views. Despite this, these emotional expressions of spiritual and ethical stresses from Tesfaye’s life are chronicled throughout the album, and I believe that these parallels to Christianity — particularly Orthodoxy— had to be intentionally written at some level. At the end of “Given Up On Me” — the mid-point of the album — he gently sings, “Ooh Lord, I want your company …. Don’t you give up on me.” If this wasn’t direct enough, The Weeknd later says on “Baptized In Fear” that “Like Paul, I’m the chief of sin / washing my soul within.”
The project struck me as the opposite of cheap uses of God’s name or an edgy cross. “Hurry Up Tomorrow” feels like a weary man drowned under the weight of a career built on his self-destruction, reaching out of the water and hoping to find someone to help out of this persona. According to interviews from the past few years, the person known as The Weeknd has long been a day job for Abel Tesfaye, a man who quit drugs years ago and looks forward to having children one day. The clincher is that the final track of “Hurry Up Tomorrow” transitions exactly with the start of his first mixtape, “House of Balloons.” This sonic loop closes the catalog into itself, creating a seamless end to the artist. It appears Abel has finally escaped The Weeknd, and now has hope for a future separate from that title. In the final moments of the album, Tesfaye cries, “I want Heaven when I die / I wanna change.”
There will always be a “Weeknd” in popular music, just by another name. But now Abel Tesfaye seems to have a chance to not be that person. To be reborn. Addicts say “I’ll quit tomorrow.” The weary say “Tomorrow will be better.” It seems that The Weeknd’s tomorrow is finally approaching.
