Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The canonical example of a musical alter ego being killed off is David Bowie’s dispatch of his Ziggy Stardust character at a London concert in 1973. Included in the setlist that night was a cover of Jacques Brel’s “My Death”. Bowie had altered its lyrics, adding a new opening line. “My death waits like an old roué,” he sang, in the soon-to-be-sacrificed guise of Ziggy.Hurry Up Tomorrow is a similar act of leave-taking. It is touted as the last album that Abel Tesfaye will make as The Weeknd. Bowie is a reference point. The Canadian is an admirer: he titled The Weeknd’s 2016 album Starboy in tribute to Ziggy Stardust’s anthem, “Starman”. But death does not wait like an old roué on this occasion. Instead it waits for the roué himself.While Ziggy was a fantasy of pop stars as alien beings, The Weeknd is a portrait of the pop star as a jaded rake, impelled by desires for sex and stimulants that can never be satisfied. Tesfaye sings the part in a sweet high voice, a pure register for impure appetites. He launched his alter ego with 2011’s House of Balloons. The music was dark and moody, an anti-hero’s take on the seductive moves of the traditional R&B loverman. “Life’s such a movie, filmed independent,” Tesfaye sang, depicting his project as arthouse fare. But it has become a blockbuster franchise.The commercial figures for The Weeknd’s music are among the mightiest of our times. Twenty-seven songs have been streamed over 1bn times on Spotify, the most by any artist. “Blinding Lights”, from 2019, is the best performing hit in the history of the Billboard singles chart. Proof that pop music has not dumbed down, it is immeasurably more sophisticated than the runner-up, Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”. Tesfaye has managed to attain peak popularity without cheapening his work. His only stumble came when he played a version of his Weeknd character in the TV series The Idol, where he was also co-creator. A lurid tale of sexual manipulation in the music industry, it was cancelled in 2023 after one season. Like a gimcrack version of the 1980s influences in his music, it resembled a straight-to-video erotic thriller.Despite the show’s flop, Tesfaye’s screen ambitions are unbowed. A movie based on Hurry Up Tomorrow is due in May, with Barry Keoghan and Jenna Ortega starring alongside the singer. The album itself lasts almost 90 minutes, a cinematic duration. With each track flowing into the next, it portrays The Weeknd as a middle-aged pop star cracking up amid a surfeit of pills, whiskey, self-loathing and applause. Love is what he really craves. Scratch a hedonist and you will find a romantic.The 22 tracks begin with an electronic heartbeat and a grand wash of Vangelis-like synthesisers. “All I have is my legacy,” Tesfaye sings in an echoing high voice, as if in a temple. The song, “Wake Me Up”, abruptly switches tempo to slickly stylised pop-funk redolent of a different kind of temple, an upscale nightclub. It is a collaboration with French dance duo Justice, the first in an impressive cast of guests.A titan of Italian disco, Giorgio Moroder, features on “Big Sleep”, a lush electronic ballad about death’s allure. Big-hitters from US rap also appear, including a woozy turn from Travis Scott on “Reflections Laughing”, a psychedelic account of a mind unravelling in the “gilded cage” of celebrity. “The Abyss” beckons, where we find Lana Del Rey performing a self-consciously decorative cameo.Surrounded by famous companions, The Weeknd sings of fame’s discontents. “Cry for Me” has him suffocating in a “penthouse prison” amid clashing chords and a heavy beat. He rallies in “São Paulo”, full-tilt Brazilian funk with the singer Anitta about a reckless tryst. But the blue funk resurfaces in “Baptized in Fear” when he sings about passing out in a bath and nearly drowning. “I’ll go overdose, I don’t want to make it past 34,” he laments mellifluously in “Enjoy the Show”.This month Tesfaye turns 35. Several references are made to his 2022 stadium gig in Los Angeles, which was cut short after he lost his voice. That alarming moment of fallibility, ascribed to stress, led to “a kind of a mental breakdown,” he told Variety magazine, “which is pretty much what this new album’s about.”Creator and character thus blur together. The concept works: it explains why Tesfaye is considering performing under his own name in future. However, it also robs Hurry Up Tomorrow of definition. Interest dwindles during a sequence of handsomely designed but inert songs in the second half.The finale, also the title track, sends The Weeknd on his way with a sumptuous ballad, a sign of the quality running through the record. But the revelation that the rakish alter ego has been “trying to fill that void that my father left so no one else abandons me” is underwhelming. Faced by pat imagery of healing sunshine and Christian forgiveness, we are left to rue the disappearance of the old roué, the one animating The Weeknd’s previous outings.★★★☆☆‘Hurry Up Tomorrow’ is released by XO/Republic Records
