Hurry Up Tomorrow Review
By Ramkumar Sridhar | Opinions | Feb. 13, 2025
On Jan. 31, 2025, after being delayed for a week, The Weeknd released his sixth studio album entitled “Hurry Up Tomorrow.” The highly anticipated album garnered much attention from listeners around the world pulling in 58 million streams on Spotify the day of its release. Also adding to the hype for the album, The Weeknd announced this will be his last album he will be releasing under his current stage name.
Leading up to the album’s release, The Weeknd released two singles – “Timeless” featuring popular rapper Playboi Carti and “Sao Paulo” featuring Brazilian artist Anitta. Both songs became very popular with “Sao Paulo” getting over 180 million streams and “Timeless” getting over 480 million streams on Spotify. These singles served as the perfect precursors to the announcement of the original release date of Jan. 24, 2025. He also announced he is releasing a movie on May 16. The Weeknd has created more publicity for the album by releasing a clothing line in collaboration with Playboi Carti for the album.
My initial impression of the album was that it did not live up to the hype and the publicity that it was getting to lead up to it. Surprise features from the likes of Future, Travis Scott, Lana Del Rey, and Playboi Carti did not seem to elevate the album to the highest tier like most people would expect hearing they were featured. While having many high-quality songs such as “Cry for Me,” “Take Me Back to LA,” and “Giving Up on Me,” it felt as though there were a surprising number of songs that did not feel like they were truly complete or they were not the best of The Weeknd’s work. Songs like “Sao Paulo,” “Niagara Falls,” and “Give me Mercy” were examples of some of the songs that did not meet my expectations.
It was hard understanding how quickly one of the best songs on the album, “Cry for Me,” could so quickly transition into arguably one of the worst in “Sao Paulo.” Instances like this made it feel as if the album was not truly complete even with the three-year gap between his last album “Dawn FM.” It made it seem as if there could have been more time taken to truly perfect the album and it sometimes felt as though the album was rushed. Although it does not make the album bad or automatically make it a miss, it just feels sometimes it is not what it really could be or it’s lacking some sort of element that most people are used to when listening to The Weeknd.
In terms of what really went wrong with the songs that did not meet the standards was how there was a lack of energy, and they did not seem to sync with the rest of the album. An example of this can be seen in how although “Sao Paulo” had a similar beat to the first half of “Cry for Me,” it did not match with the rest of the song. This made me feel that instead of having “Sao Paulo” at track four, they should have put it at track two and moved the rest of the songs down a spot. This would have led to more synchronization between the two songs due to “Sao Paulo” having a Brazilian style production for the entirety of the song and “Cry for me” having it for the first half, it would have felt like the perfect transition if “Cry for Me” followed “Sao Paulo.” When listening to the album, “Give me Mercy” really felt like it did not even have to be included in the album. It felt like it was a thrown in song and it really did not serve too much of a purpose for the album.
The album was executive produced by The Weeknd, Mike Dean, Sage Skolfield, OPN and Nathan Salon. With these producers, listeners have come to expect excellent and consistent production, but for this album it felt inconsistent. Some songs were well executed and matched well with The Weeknd’s voice, while others just did not work well. Sometimes it felt like there could have been better production on songs or different beats used. In general, the production was solid, however, it felt like it could have been much better due to the people who helped produce the album.
In general, “Hurry Up Tomorrow’ is a good album, but it felt like it could have been so much better and really could have been one of the best in his discography. There were just too many songs that felt like they were thrown in and not properly developed. All in all, the album meets the mark, but when compared to his other albums, it does not stack up that well.