Culture

The following story contains spoilers from Hurry Up Tomorrow.
Four months after The Weeknd released his Billboard 200-topping album Hurry Up Tomorrow, XO fans are finally able to watch the film that inspired its inception in theaters, starting Friday (May 16).

Directed by Trey Edward Shults, Hurry Up Tomorrow follows a fictional version of the superstar (also named Abel) who’s “plagued by insomnia” and “is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger who begins to unravel the very core of his existence,” according to the official synopsis. But what’s soundtracking his nightmarish journey digs even deeper into The Weeknd’s lore.

“Wake Me Up,” the Justice-featuring synth-pop album opener, also serves as the film’s opening “concert song.” The show The Weeknd performs at a that looks identical to the ones he held in Brazil and Australia last fall, where he wore a black and gold kaba — a hand-embroidered Ethiopian robe historically worn by royals and traditionally worn at weddings — and sang atop a rock-hewn church, resembling Lalibela, in the northern region of his motherland. He debuted “Wake Me Up” at his São Paulo show in September.

“We always wanted a performance song that we can open the film with, and in the vein of a pop record, and ‘Wake Me Up’ was the inspiration,” The Weeknd tells Billboard. He performs the song again at a different concert later in the film, where he ends up losing his voice – mimicking The Weeknd’s real-life experience at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium in September 2022, when he had to cut his concert short for the same reason. That incident, as well as The Weeknd’s sleep paralysis diagnosis, are key influences in Hurry Up Tomorrow.  

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The film’s Oscar-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn says they remixed the first “Wake Me Up” performance in the film “35 times, trying to get the balance of how much crowd sound you would hear, how the music would come across. Are you hearing it from Abel’s perspective? We tried that. Are you hearing it from the audience’s perspective? No. Are you hearing it from a deeply psychological, emotional ride? Yeah, you are.”

Burn, who says he went from “dancing around my kitchen to Abel’s music” as a fan to “dancing around the mixing room” with the man himself, says the process involved everything from asking Mike Dean for “a new synth line that sounds a bit more live” to miking The Weeknd while he recorded new lyrics that better suited the storyline. When The Weeknd was changing up a few lyrics during the cutaways, “I said, ‘Well, you’re probably in quite an adrenaline state when you go out in front of 80,000 people.’ So I made him do push-ups to get kind of worked up,” Burn recalls with a chuckle. “He was like, ‘What, now?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, get down and give me 20.’”

Burn says the song that required the most fine-tuning was the cathartic centerpiece “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which The Weeknd explains was inspired by the titular track from Robert Altman’s 1973 satirical noir film The Long Goodbye, because of how frequently it appears. “You hear it throughout the entire film, different iterations of it. You hear it on the radio, you hear a pop version of it, subjectively in the score, diegetically, a mariachi band will sing it every time he goes to Mexico. And I wanted to do that with ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow,’” he explains.

Abel first plays Anima (played by Jenna Ortega) a stripped-down draft of it off his phone in a hotel room. Moved to tears, Anima admits she relates to its autobiographical lyrics — because her father left when she was a kid, her mother struggled to raise her alone and she abandoned home to forge her own path that’s fraught with inescapable loneliness. The next morning, Abel turns around while sitting on the hotel bed and faintly hears Anima singing some of the first verse in the shower behind closed doors. He later encounters his younger self, who’s swaddled in a gabi, a white handwoven Ethiopian cotton blanket, and singing a few lines in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia. But after Anima douses him and the hotel bed he’s tied to with gasoline — and right as she holds a lighter above him — Abel belts an a cappella version that feels like he is literally singing for his life: “So burn me with your light/ I have no more fights left to win/ Tie me up to face it, I can’t run away, and/ I’ll accept that it’s the end.”

“You’re seeing the making of it, not literally me making it, but the themes and the concept and the melody and the soul of it is being made throughout the film. By the end of it, it’s fully blossomed into this song, which essentially is what the film is saying,” says The Weeknd, who adds that he had “to finish the lyrics the night before I had to perform it at the end.”

Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye as Abel and Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults in ‘Hurry Up Tomorrow.’

Andrew Cooper for Lionsgate

But outside of the Hurry Up Tomorrow tracks, fans will be surprised to hear two earlier songs from The Weeknd’s discography in the film: his 2021 blockbuster hit “Blinding Lights” – which is the top Billboard Hot 100 song of all time – and “Gasoline,” the first track from his 2022 album Dawn FM. Anima analyzes the emptiness and heartache in the songs as she hysterically lip-syncs and dances to them, and she later questions Abel if he’s the true toxic subject behind his music.

“What I am doing by the end of the film is, I’m lighting my persona up on fire. But to tap into that, you need to go into the back catalog a little bit, and take in what I’m saying in some of these lyrics and how they’re masked by pop elements,” he says. “It’s always been a joke that joke with The Weeknd music, where it makes you sing and dance and it feels jolly. And then when you actually get into the themes of it, it’s something much deeper — and maybe a call for help, who knows. That’s how [Anima’s] reading it, and essentially forcing myself to face myself.”

There are other callbacks to his catalog in the sound design. The guttural shrieks heard right after Anima swings a champagne bottle over Abel’s head and knocks him out when he first tries leaving the hotel room sound reminiscent of the title track of his 2013 debut studio album Kiss Land. The “Easter eggs,” as Burn calls them, extend beyond the film — as fans pointed out online that the ending of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” which serves as the final track of The Weeknd’s album, seamlessly transitions into the beginning of “High For This,” the first track off his 2011 debut mixtape House of Balloons.

While Hurry Up Tomorrow bids farewell to the character Abel Tesfaye has played for over a decade, it also underscores the long-standing symbiotic relationship between music and film in The Weeknd’s world. “When you hear the screams in the record and you hear all these horror references and you feel scared, listen to the music — because I want you to feel what I’m feeling. Kiss Land is like a horror movie,” The Weeknd told Complex in his first-ever interview back in 2013.

“We wanted to do something we’ve never seen or heard on screen before,” he says now. “We were able to do these big swings, and I think they landed well in the film. I’m really proud of the music, and I’m proud of the sonics of it. It’s much different from the album. It’s like its own experience.”