Pitchfork Reviews The Weeknd's New Album, Give it 7.8

[RAMROD 105,926]

 

Hurry Up Tomorrow shows off his versatility, oscillating between the murky, muddy soundscape that defined his first Trilogy and the gleaming disco-flecked pop that has buoyed his last few releases. He stuffs the album with surprises: We get both the gloriously sludgy “Reflections Laughing,” with Travis Scott’s pitched-down vocals echoing through the void, and the neon buzz when Justice crash into “Wake Me Up.” But the album achieves real drama when entropy kicks in: when Lana Del Rey’s vocals ricochet and reverberate at the end of “The Abyss,” when the frictive interlude “Until We’re Skin and Bones” hurtles into warp speed, when “São Paulo” spins out into a dancefloor panic attack. Hurry Up Tomorrow always seems like it’s about to lurch out of your grasp. The vertigo is the thrill.

At 84 minutes, the album is undeniably bloated, but it charges forward in part because the transitions glide so seamlessly from one track to the next. Credit Oneohtrix Point Never—who returns from his work on 2022’s Dawn FM and 2020’s After Hours—and Mike Dean—who returns from his work on 2023’s flummoxing music to HBO’s The Idol—as co-producers to enhance and sharpen every second of the synth and drum programming. Their touch, along with a coterie of other A-list producers and songwriters, make the whole album sound ready for an IMAX theater. No wonder Tesfaye is starring in a feature-length thriller coming out in May tied to the album, also called Hurry Up Tomorrow.

It’s that clarity that leads the Weeknd into his final act: apologizing. “I hope my confession is enough,” he begs on the closing track as a power-ballad piano line builds underneath him—but the song slips cleanly into the opening seconds of “High for This,” the first track from House of Balloons, the opening chapter of his first Trilogy. All that mechanical repentance, all the elaborate ways he’s promised to move on, mean nothing when the cycle starts back up. The Weeknd has always presented annihilation as a kind of benediction, self-destruction as the most legible impulse. An object in motion stays in motion; a “Party Monster” stays at the party; a man who constructed an entire album about a slow drive through purgatory pleads for heaven and then winds up exactly where he started: dead-eyed in the clammy dark, waiting for another night to begin.

 

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weeknd-hurry-up-tomorrow/

[fede ARTPOP 6,405]

19 minutes ago, RAMROD said:

Hurry Up Tomorrow shows off his versatility

[River 107,634]

their reviews are so different between male and female artists

[Teletubby 139,267]

10 minutes ago, River said:

their reviews are so different between male and female artists

most of the artists get positive reviews now, they were one of the few publications that positively reviewed Camila Cabello's album without focusing on comparing Camila to Charli

Edited 4 hours ago by Teletubby

[River 107,634]

5 minutes ago, Teletubby said:

most of the artists get positive reviews now, they were one of the few publications that positively reviewed Camila Cabello's album without focusing on comparing Camila to Charli

but they did that became all the rest of the reviews were mid

but what i mean is that usually with female artists, they very much dig into their private life, rumors and gossip and give a very little time to actually review the album, while they don't do that for male artists, they like glorifying them constantly and the review is more seriously written.