Hurry Up Tomorrow is billed as the final album under The Weeknd’s current pseudonym. It is a glorious finale to a long, storied career. We have all that sustained him throughout: a lush bed of synthesizers and lyrics laden with imagery about the end times. Throughout the album itself, his sonic palette is as expansive as ever, but the lyricism goes back to the same themes he is enthralled with: fame and the existentialism, sex, partying and drugs that comes with it.

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We have all that sustained him throughout: a lush bed of synthesizers and lyrics laden with imagery about the end times.

Then the question becomes: to what extent is this death so thunderously literal? We hear a faint slosh of water as he croons about drowning in a bath, and his typical crepuscular production thuds in the background as he vacillates between alternately predatory and injured tones and tunes. It is difficult to scrape up much sympathy when he starts discussing how difficult it is to be rich and famous (and calling to the heavens to absolve him of it, even!). This goes double when he does this without even deigning to come up with more original phrasing (“in this penthouse prison, I’m alone” sounds beautiful only when you don’t think about it for too long, and at least half of the references to a crown could have been removed). This way, his film references are a blessing; over Brazilian funk and slow R&B and disco-flecked pop and sweeping ballads, he leans into the brooding anti-hero persona and personifies his fame as a fickle, “chronically online” mistress, and in one song notably incorporates the late David Lynch’s Eraserhead to sing about his father’s departure. Still, though, it could be considered that in this album (and its accompanying film) the most prominent tribute is musically to Michael Jackson and cinematically to Gasper Noé. (As he collaborates with Giorgio Moroder on multiple tracks here, I’d argue that the gap between influence and impact has been bridged.)

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Everyone sounds appropriately and cinematically gorgeous, providing much-needed breaks from Tesfaye’s very ethereally pretty but also very repetitive vibrato falsetto.

And his collaborators, from Lana del Rey to Future, make surprising and intriguing cameos here. Anitta represents a fascinating break from his usual terrain, rapping in Portuguese over a vivid production. Everyone sounds appropriately and cinematically gorgeous, providing much-needed breaks from Tesfaye’s very ethereally pretty but also very repetitive vibrato falsetto. Bleak solipsism is undercut brilliantly by an ample amount of self-loathing, a luscious epic that knows it is overstaying its welcome and that you will listen to it in its entirety anyway. Maximalist, moody pop instrumentals have never made banality sound more appealing.

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