He is scheduled to perform March 7 on Saturday Night Live, which all but confirms new music will arrive between now and then, so he can perform probably "Heartless" and one other new song on the show. And while those songs have been building streaming and radio plays, he hasn't released anything since. He shared the news curiously with a tweet simply announcing "album title" and a short video possibly containing strains of new music and then the big reveal of the title in a very dramatic, letter-by-letter unveiling.Īt first, it seems to be a bit anticlimatic, given the singer born Abel Tesfaye shared the first two songs "Heartless" and "Blinding Lights" back in November. “Now gotta change my numbers twice a month, when you could have simply kept me on the down low,” he sang.The Weeknd on Thursday confirmed the title of his new album, which is called After Hours. Her friends are now calling him looking for similar satisfaction. On “The Birds, Part 1,” from his 2011 mixtape “Thursday,” he sang to a lover, warning her that an affair with him “is no game - you’ll be falling to the point of no return.” And his “Twenty Eight” regards a woman who ruined her chance for Weeknd sex by blabbing too much about what a great lover Tesfaye is. None involved going home and crawling into bed to get a fresh start on Sunday morning.Īt times, these nights were a little much, filled with a drama that many young men at the Orpheum no doubt envied. The kind that merely begin with a concert before spilling out in kaleidoscopic ways throughout the city. Tesfaye is, in his own right, a voice to reckon with.Īs the evening progressed, the climate in the theater seemed to thicken with the bigger rhythms, got more humid as sweat mixed with passion - and many gooey public displays of affection amid the crowd - to create a Saturday night of the kind Tesfaye conjured in his songs. He sequenced them perfectly, so that by the end the little spark he’d ignited had raged.īest known for his work with the rapper Drake - most recently on the track “Crew Love,” which he quoted near the evening’s peak - the Weeknd proved that this creative relationship isn’t an accident or a lucky twist of fate.
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Tesfaye has dropped two other free EPs since “House of Balloons,” collected recently as his major label debut, “Trilogy,” and over a full set at the Orpheum he presented a selection from each.
On “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls,” he illuminated a night of sex and drugs, while musically surrounding him was a Siouxsie and the Banshees sample and vocal hook from their song “Happy House.” The title track of “House of Balloons” recalled days too long and evenings that fly by, waking in the “same clothes, you ain’t ready for your day shift.” On the exquisitely debauched “The Party & the After Party,” he promised love and cocaine to a girl by suggesting that she “grab them shoes, I’ll race your ass up on them stairs.”
Few of these exploits happened before midnight or after 7 a.m.
They described lusty adventures through lyrics designed to seduce the ladies and empower the men. Tesfaye spent the night verbally crafting such scenes. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, he seemed to suggest: “You may never get a chance like this to show off, show off, show off what you talking about.” The women in the crowd - mostly young twentysomethings who roared when Tesfaye cited his age in a lyric - lapped up this assuredness.