I really haven’t been able to enjoy the fruits of my labor.” “Usually you go to a club or you go driving. “I’ve been cooped up here for the last four months,” Tesfaye adds. Still, there’s a touch of frustration in his voice as he explains why After Hours’ runaway success hasn’t felt quite the same as what he experienced with 2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness - his first true pop blockbuster, driven by the Max Martin-produced single “Can’t Feel My Face” - or 2016’s Starboy, when he teamed up with Daft Punk for an experimental pop journey. “Sometimes, your fucking stars just line up.” “We work really hard, like everyone else, to maintain that mystique and maintain our original sound, and still cross over and bring it with us,” he says. (Like many other 30-year-olds, Tesfaye says he will probably never learn the “Blinding Lights” dance.) The song even spawned its own dance challenge, involving synchronized aerobic moves meant only for the very-coordinated. His chart-topping, Eighties-pop-inspired single “Blinding Lights” has been a fixture on the Rolling Stone Top 100 Songs chart since its release, and it’s reigned for months as one of the biggest songs on TikTok, the viral-video app that has become integral to pop success over the past two years. alone, according to Alpha Data, the company that powers the Rolling Stone charts. The world seems to agree on its perfection: After Hours is one of the past year’s biggest commercial smashes, by late August raking in 1.5 million album-equivalent units in the U.S. “I really haven’t been able to enjoy the fruits of my labor.” “I’ve been cooped up here for the last four months,” says the Weeknd. I could go back and listen to it and be like, ‘I’ve got no notes for this, really.’ ” But to me, it’s definitely my most perfect album. “It might not be what people gravitate towards the most in the future. “It might not be my best album,” he says. The result is an album that puts him in contention for the 2021 Grammy Awards in several top categories, and one he’s immensely proud of. “I just didn’t have the resources or the budget or the time to make them as cohesive and as singular as After Hours was visually.” “I’ve always tried to do what I do with After Hours with every record I’ve ever done,” he says. The vision he brought to the photo shoots and music videos for those projects, which were compiled on 2012’s Trilogy after he signed with Republic Records, created a mystique that was central to his appeal at the start of his career. Every photo shoot, music video, and TV performance has been an extension of his fun-house-mirror world.įor Tesfaye, that immersive work scratched an itch that goes back to his earliest independent mixtapes, starting with 2011’s House of Balloons. To promote the album, he’s embraced a level of campiness he has only hinted at before, diving bloodied and bandaged nose-first into a spiraling, self-destructive character straight out of a David Lynch film. The druggy vibe and nihilistic lyrics of tracks like “Faith” and “Heartless” hearken back to a more turbulent time in his past, evoking his very public 2015 arrest for allegedly punching a Las Vegas cop, and assorted other benders. It took two years, and he ended up building his most fully-realized world yet, an ambitious visual and musical cycle full of bruising fights, shady figures, dizzying neon lights, and inner demons. Tesfaye, who has called himself a “workaholic,” put together After Hours at studios in New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, and right here at home. Truthfully, though, sheltering in place hasn’t been all that different from how he usually works. “I’ve been going kind of mad, actually,” he admits. There’s been a lot of time to fill lately, ever since he had to postpone or cancel months of touring and other promotional plans meant to follow the release of his album. “I’ll write about their relationship or something in a song,” he says. Sometimes he writes songs to the scenes and characters onscreen. ( The Wailing, a 2016 horror film about a mysterious plague, and I Saw the Devil, a 2010 action thriller about a man on a revenge mission, are two of his favorites.) He recently finished Waco and Unsolved Mysteries, among other Netflix and Hulu shows he’s been bingeing to pass the time. And he’s been watching movies - lots of movies, mostly ultraviolent Korean cinema. In August, he celebrated the birthday of his Doberman, Caesar, with a cake for his “son” that he definitely didn’t bake himself. He works with a small group of people that includes photographer Nabil Elderkin and a few trusted affiliates and friends from his label, XO, all of whom get tested for Covid-19 every two weeks. As an asthmatic, Tesfaye has been taking extra precautions since the pandemic began.
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