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The Weeknd’s Endless Summer - Rolling Stone
Sep 18, 2020 5 mins, 21 secs
It’s a little jarring to see him in anything other than the slick red suit and bright-orange vintage-style frames he’s been sporting most of this year, as part of the action-packed, conceptual promotional campaign for his fourth album, After Hours.

And he’s been watching movies — lots of movies, mostly ultraviolent Korean cinema.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”.

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.

But to me, it’s definitely my most perfect album.

“I’ve been cooped up here for the last four months,” says the Weeknd.

(Like many other 30-year-olds, Tesfaye says he will probably never learn the “Blinding Lights” dance.).

Instead of continuing work on the LP he’d started writing, he detoured and wrote a secretive screenplay that he refuses to discuss in detail — just one of several such projects he’s begun dreaming up since.

In the middle of writing After Hours, he got a taste of what it’s like to be on someone else’s set when the Safdie brothers recruited him for a small part in 2019’s Uncut Gems, the buzzy, Oscar-robbed Adam Sandler action flick about a Diamond District jeweler with a gambling problem.

“This is my first time even opening up to anything, because I had to spend the last decade invested in this project, the Weeknd,” he says.

He was particularly thrilled about American Dad, posting more on Instagram about his guest spot — in which he voiced an uptight, virginal cartoon version of himself — than he did about his actual album.

“I just want to be a filmmaker,” Tesfaye says in earnest.

in the lead-up to After Hours’ March 20th release date, the Weeknd became one of the few major artists to stick with a previously announced album schedule for this spring.

He’s already done enough socially distant photo shoots to know that it’s not for him.

As summer wanes, he’s begun to explore other possibilities for connecting with the world, like the TikTok-hosted virtual “experience” he offered fans in lieu of his live show.

That hasn’t left him much time to listen to new music.

He’s rooting for Roddy Ricch and Megan Thee Stallion, though, and he empathizes with the countless artists who have struggled to get their careers off the ground this year.

“A lot of new artists, they need touring,” Tesfaye says, speaking as a pop elder.

It was hard to show to the execs — or just to the game — that the Weeknd is more than an underground sensation.

“I tell my friends all the time it feels like my career is just starting,” he says.

While he was doing so, his sound became a palpable influence on heroes and peers, from Drake to Beyoncé — and all the while the Weeknd moved closer to pop’s center.

This past June, the Grammys renamed the Best Urban Contemporary Album category, in which Tesfaye has won two of his three Grammys, after Tyler, the Creator pointed out in January that it felt like a catchall for black artists making genre-bending music.

“It was peculiar,” Tesfaye says of the category, which is now Progressive R&B.

“Putting an album like Starboy and putting an album like Beauty Behind the Madness in the same category as some other artists, it’s not fair.” Both of those albums were, proudly, pop projects that ended up winning Grammys against artists as different from one another as Childish Gambino, Lianne La Havas, and SZA.

“I heard a lot of crickets,” Tesfaye says

“I just felt like, ‘You know what

“If it’s time for film, then everybody will be focusing on film

If it’s time for Nav, everybody’s focusing on that

If it’s time for the Weeknd, everyone’s focusing on the Weeknd

The Weeknd’s empire could grow by one more album by the time life returns to normal: Lately, he’s begun producing some of the new songs he’s written out of a makeshift studio in his condo

“I might have another album ready to go by the time this quarantine is over,” he says with the slightest smirk implied in his voice, as if threatening another inescapable hit

It’s a drive he never wants to lose, which is why he’s spent his months at home doing songwriting exercises while marathoning Korean horror films

“But it’s never like, ‘I’ve got to do the same type of song.’ I’m so happy I’m not like that

Accordingly, he promises, the music he’s writing is in a whole different world from After Hours — a brand-new planet in the Weeknd Cinematic Universe

“I’m trying to find a perfect balance with the film and the music, and so far it’s going really well,” he says

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