The Weeknd's After Hours: The Death and Rebirth of Persona

And the exploration of what it feels like to hurt yourself.

I have long wanted to write about The Weeknd in terms of his persona. Ever since my earlier teenage years, I’ve been fascinated by Abel Tesfaye and the Weeknd character, who would constantly mix decadent and outlandish hedonism with very raw and palpable heartbreak. While in recent years, mainstream RnB’s sound has went firmly towards the ambience of trapsoul and depressive beats, no one has ever sounded more fucking broken and aimless than The Weeknd. On Trilogy (his compilation of the House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence mixtapes from 2011) he’s petulant and aims for grandiose moments of misogynistic abandonment and mysterious sensuality, but has so many breakdowns where the horror of nightclubs, dirty Toronto bathrooms and pitch black streets completely overtake his ability to process information. Trilogy is about the mystery, the anonymity and therefore has no real insight into his relationships with women or his own personal life when the long nights end. It is distanced and lacks the sincerity of a lot of his later work such as Beauty Behind the Madness, where he balances his need for casual hedonism with genuine romantic interest and heartbreak. Trilogy is a vessel for the most depressed and hurtful impulses, a record where darkness is all there is, where humanity can be compartmentalised in favour of the needs to fuck and snort and drink until the sun rises. It’s a collection of songs that unsurprisingly connected deeply with many depressed, aimless people who tried losing themselves in substances and other forms of immersion, only to remain sad at the end of the night. It’s not a surprise that when I was a younger depressive that The Weeknd was the alternative to the more humanistic Kid Cudi, who I listened to when I needed to feel less alone about my depression. I put The Weeknd on when I was angry and sad and wanted to feel validated about my own pain, and as the years have gone by, I’ve found even more nuance from the way he constructs the worlds of his songs and conveys very real emotion even under the guise of the persona. 

I was always interested in The Weeknd as a persona because I liked the idea of a constant piece of characterisation in a musical career, that would develop and change and show cracks over the course of a lifetime in the industry. That was the piece I wanted to write about years ago and never did because I wasn’t ready. Now that After Hours has been out for almost a year and I’ve grown up considerably as a human being and as a writer, it felt like the time to complete something on The Weeknd, to go through his discography and make the single piece that encapsulates all the fractured moments of genuine truth that make Abel Tesfaye’s persona so interesting. But as I re-listened to After Hours, I realised that I needed to shift my aims. I had far too much to say about this one album’s incorporation of explicit artificiality which elicits genuine truth and if I decided to cover the entire discography, this essay would be the length of a novella. In a brief summation, the Trilogy to Starboy run of projects showed The Weeknd character being an unrepentant bastard who just wants to die in some fucked up nightclub, towards being a bitter romantic who can’t ignore his worst impulses, to being a genuinely heartfelt and sincere presence who has managed to coalesce his demons into something fulfilling. My Dear Melancholy brought back The Weeknd character as a conduit for the worst emotional pain in the universe, and After Hours is the natural extension of delving back into that agony, realising that your body and soul just aren’t durable enough to take the pain and abuse that you’re inflicting upon it. What stands out most about After Hours, which is possibly the masterpiece of his career, is that even outside of the narrative journey between projects, it’s the most affecting record I’ve ever heard about self harm and how it feels to be trapped with a permanent desire to hurt yourself. After Hours sounds like suicide, not in terms of the physical act but in the desperate longing for existence to just stop, and it captures all the ups and downs that come from lingering in the worst side of your brain. It’s not a subtle record and it’s not miserablist throughout, The Weeknd’s most successful accomplishment as an artist is that he makes incredibly dark and resonant songs that you can listen to dozens of times without wanting to fall apart, but it is a deeply poetic and personal project about trying to keep yourself from dying, especially when living feels impossible.

The album opens with a crushing song, Alone Again, about not being able to cope with being alone after such comparatively little time in the light with someone who loves him. It is a truly staggering introduction, building up a considered ambience before doing a gutturally affecting beat switch and providing the first tastes of darkness on the record. Even in the more casual introduction of the song, he sings about taking off his disguise and suppressing who he is inside, a reference not just to the impending darkness that’s to come but the fractures that have  penetrated this relationship’s core. The quiet build to the overwhelming rush of emotion and fear of isolation is a distinct separation from how other songs from his discography utilise beat switches, such as the lavish degeneracy turned coked out paranoia of House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls and the bitter toxicity of The Party and the After Party. Alone Again is always a bit more subdued in terms of Weeknd’s vocals, the production is glossed up and more reminiscent of Perfume Genius’ Whole Life than it is for any other beat in Weeknd’s discography, but his vocals are more calm and heartbroken than anticipated. He sounds genuinely vulnerable in the opening two minutes, before the repetition of “I don’t know if I can be alone again” starts to drain out any feeling in his vocals. The album doesn’t get more positive very quickly, with Too Late being one of the most confrontational and explicit break-up anthems of his career. Neither of these songs show Abel descending further into the debaucherous Weeknd persona, with a sense of longing and desperation for the woman he loves to save his soul with him. He sings about being on our own, before the dark voice within him reminds him that it’s just Abel on his own now, destined to face whatever void comes without his woman. These lines have obviously connected with me since I’ve been grappling with the idea that my girlfriend might never be healthy again over the last 10 months, and while there will never be a record that captures my exact situation, the haunting desperation to not be alone without her forever resonates very deeply with me. 

The next two songs are ballads and reflect upon the central relationship of the album’s structure. Hardest To Love is extremely confrontational towards Abel himself for failing to be a good partner, with his writing expressing that he’s shocked that this love of his still trusts and loves him. In terms of the larger narrative of After Hours, it fits as a follow-up to the opening two songs as it’s about this woman trying to completely let go from this relationship that’s not working but still not being able to give up. Scared To Live connects to me very hard. It elicits how it feels to face the realities of a relationship ending on bitter terms, with no nice resolutions or agreements to stay friends. It reminds me of cruel feelings of hate, of wishing that all the memories of a broken relationship would evaporate into ash. I’ve had a couple of those, the worst one being a year long relationship ending due to their infidelity, and experiencing the end of that year of my life in a stranger’s bed 400 miles from home. I sucked it up, went forward with my plans, kept the thoughts to myself and cried whenever I was alone, trying to keep myself contained and failing. Yet, after a few days, I learned the only way to get forward was to stop clinging onto my anger and hatred, to allow myself to exist on my own terms outside of a toxic partnership, to hope that my ex could find happiness and solace outside of me. Not because they deserve it or because it was easy, but because I couldn’t take one more thing to be bitter about. Scared to Live is most reminiscent of his closer of Beauty Behind The Madness, Angel, in that it’s about separating your own emotions from a situation and wishing the best for someone that’s hurt you, forcing yourself to be the bigger person even if it hurts. Angel comes across as more genuine, with Weeknd’s vocals being embedded with such overwhelming sincerity and emotion that the coda succeeds at capturing melancholia. It’s heartbreaking but beautiful in its own way, especially considering that so much of the album is focused on The Weeknd embracing his own failures. Scared to Live is sincere as well but more focused on the character’s perspective, still clinging onto the ideas of what might have been in this relationship instead of solely focusing on the future. He wishes that he’d made her his “only” and that regret breaks him apart, but it won’t stop him from hoping that they’re both able to live on their own terms It’s the last time the sound of the album is calm, the last time the emotions are civilised. It’s interesting that both of these songs are positioned in the album’s first act, with the content and form being more comparable to Beauty Behind The Madness and Starboy’s final stretches, more romantic and reflective songs than the darkness that preceded it. Instead, After Hours decides to confront the final stage of grief first, showing the potentially horrible consequences of accelerating your healing for the sake of others. 

If I had to summarise After Hours in a single sentence, it would be using persona as a dependency to cope with unbearable heartbreak. The album opens with these four songs designed to humanise Abel and the unnamed woman, almost a mini arc in of itself that fleshes out an idea of their relationship and tries to find catharsis by hoping that she’s able to live again and find someone else. That was how Beauty Behind The Madness ended. In a sense, it’s how Starboy did. For After Hours, it leads into one of the darkest stretches on any of The Weeknd’s LPs. Snowchild is the first sign that this isn’t going to be an album that continues to focus on accepting romantic failure and learning how to move forward. Now that the woman has been directly removed from the songs’ narrative, Abel is allowed to languish in the midst of darkness on his own terms without trying to be selfless for her. He talks about wanting to make his wrist bleed, about his struggles with poverty as a young man, how his career has led him into an existence of empty ill-consumed hedonism and his struggles with the burdens that his new life has placed upon him. The final lines involving him “leaving into the night” is a very symbolic portrait of wanting to die in my eyes, being desperate to just disappear in the midst of darkness to make the burdens of ennui go away. Positioning it right after the opening four songs makes it stand out even further, and Escape from LA directly positions these ideas with his broken relationship. Both Snowchild and Escape from LA are the beginnings of the Weeknd persona taking over the album, with Heartless being the major tipping point where the album descends into nightmares. Escape from LA does a similar switch as Alone Again, but instead of the walls trembling and shifting around the listener, it’s a much more subtle change that makes the pain of the lyricism stand out even further. The majority of the 6 minute song is devoted to his desperation to leaving LA while he’s still involved with his partner, following him as he struggles with his impulses for reckless abandonment (the most Weeknd line of the album being “and for that pussy, you know I’m a slave”) and his desires to keep this relationship intact. It’s a vulnerable flashback song, explicitly about failings and anxieties and how much he needs this woman to feel some semblance of happiness. When the production shifts, it cuts back to the present with Abel reflecting on some of the good times they had before it all slips away. His tone is bitter and heartbroken, that lingering rage which comes from the memories of a bad break-up. I’m not sure he could have sung the words “we had sex in the studio” in a more bleak and clamouring way. There’s some more debauched and nihilistic lyricism in the second half as well “a cold hearted bitch with no shame. It stands out in The Weeknd’s discography as an arc because instead of using hedonism to cover up longing vulnerability, it immediately confronts his pain and his heartbreak before showing the persona as the escape, as the understanding that this idea of Abel Tesfaye doesn’t know how to accept hurt and will do anything to keep it from infecting whatever soul he has left. Instead of recontextualising earlier embraces of hedonism like Beauty Behind The Madness’s ending, the album’s sequencing embeds Heartless with melancholy from the first listen, knowing that this drugged out reckless song is a new form of dependency for the broken hearted. 

Heartless is the fucking best. Choosing to slot it in this space of the album was a masterful decision as it is the perfect transition towards the second half of the record, an utterly magnificent adrenaline rush of a lead single that sums up the early stage of abandonment. The Weeknd positions himself as Heartless, incapable of experiencing any further pain, completely succumbing to the base desires and monstrous persona of his past, fucking and snorting and degrading until the night ends in a boom. It’s one of the most purely entertaining songs of his discography in isolation, with the beat’s pace incapable of not hyping me up and the lyrics filled with such amazing lines like “Metro Boomin turn this ho into a mosh pit”) but is embedded with such bitter disgust throughout. It opens with the declaration “never need a bitch, I’m what a bitch need” before openly leaning into his use of amphetamines and his notorious sex life. The chorus is built around him choosing not to feel anything anymore, becoming nothing but a vessel for impermanent pleasure. When the song reaches its coda and slows down for a few seconds, there is the acceptance, like in all of The Weeknd’s best hedonistic songs, that this declaration is impossible and that the melancholy’s starting to become impossible to ignore and it hurts. You feel the anguish in his vocals that nothing’s enough to keep the bad feelings and pain away, not even numbing yourself with drugs and driving a million dollar car down the other side of the highway. In the context of the album, hearing him force himself back into embracing heartlessness is crushing and leads into one of his greatest singles to date.

Faith is the best song on After Hours in my opinion and over the last year, has crept its way up the list to be amongst my favourite Weeknd songs alongside The Party and the After Party, Angel, XO/The Host, Initiation, Die For You and Privilege. This is a song that leans further into the cruelty of the Weeknd’s most depraved musical output, with the opening lines explicitly talking about cocaine and cutting away his pain before detailing his failure to stay sober. It’s a song about relapsing into his old self, not just as an addict but as a human being, sinking himself back into the person he was 10 years ago because he feels completely broken as who he is now. The character of The Weeknd has never sounded so lost or vile as he does when professing his desire for his girl to OD right beside him and hold him as he’s dying. It’s putrid at times and made even more haunting by the slick production and professional sound, glossed up sadism that borders on true reflection before the devil in the mirror takes another swing. Then, like with Escape from LA, the beat switches but this time to something even more minimalist. It feels like his voice is in another dimension, separated from any conventional construct of reality as these vague sounds in the background get louder and clearer. His voice gets weaker the more he sings about losing his religion and time’s distinct lack of kindness towards him, and everything in the background becomes deafening. The moment you realise that the noises are the sirens from ambulances and that he’s either overdosed or attempted suicide, the entire framework of the album changes and becomes something entirely otherworldly. The ending of Faith is most reminiscent of Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, a shell of a man kept alive by the sound of the ambulances and the ghosts in his dreams, with the ending approaching the kind of fantastical horror that Scorsese’s masterpiece conveys. It is the most successful narrative pay off within one of his projects to date, a wonderful example of long term, sequential storytelling that personally connects to me as someone who has found a lot of resonance from implied but disconnected narratives in his previous work. A man who has tried time and time again to approach that effortless depravity and hedonism of his youth, but who is too fragile, fucked up and utterly bereft to end up surviving it. Yet again, like at the end of Escape from LA, the sequencing of After Hours re-contextualises one of the smash singles that immediately follows it. 

Blinding Lights, the biggest hit of 2020 and still on its path to being one of the most successful songs of all time, is the most infectious and catchy work of The Weeknd’s career. It’s a song that couldn’t have failed to succeed on the charts, with the glittery synths, slick production and staggering chorus enthralling millions of listeners around the world. It is a song that just pumps you up and makes you excited to work out or get up to do chores or whatever is occupying your time in the midst of lockdown, and outside of the album, functions as one of the most euphoric pop songs of the last decade. Within the context of After Hours as a project, knowing that the Blinding Lights refer to the red and blue sirens of the ambulance, Blinding Lights strikes me as a fantasy. A gorgeous, empty paradise of colliding dreams and nightmares, a synthesis of glamorous excess and romantic connection. The next few songs of the album all strike me as within Weeknd’s head to a certain extent, with Blinding Lights the adrenaline rush of hope and movement that he needs as he struggles to keep his grasp on life itself. The line “I can feel your touch” strikes me as longing, as the embrace of fantasy over reality. Sometimes clinging onto the idea of an image, even if it’s not real, is the only thing you can do to keep from falling apart. It’s no surprise that it ends with the declaration “until I feel your touch” signifying the dissolution of fantasy but continuing the hope that one day, he’ll feel her in his arms once more. It is still an infectiously entertaining track, even with that extra context, but similarly to Heartless, it’s layered in such effective nuance and melancholy which boosts them above just being sensational pop singles. 

In Your Eyes is the most upbeat song on the whole record, a purely romantic pop jam that still doesn’t let go of the regrets and mistakes that Weeknd’s made across the LP. He is singing about how she’s trying to hide the pain and move away from the things he’s done to her, but there’s an upbeat quality to it, boosted by the saxophone on the beat and Weeknd’s enthusiastic delivery that contains an element of fantasy to it. It feels like the imagination of reconciliation to me, an acknowledgement that even within the subconscious, that Weeknd has done some things that will be difficult to forgive. There’s something truly melancholic about the fact that even in the truly joyous pop songs and characterised moments of fantasia, there is no real relief for The Weeknd as a character, he is still defined by failure and sadness and the lingering realisation of eternal solitude. Save Your Tears is yet another instance of the production providing upbeat qualities that are balanced out by the lyrics. While Blinding Lights is vague in depicting its destructive elements and In Your Eyes is more confrontational but still provides some hope in its lyrics, Save Your Tears is the moment when reality is starting to sink back in and the recovery from the blood loss is starting to take effect. This is the song on the album begging for forgiveness, not acting like it’s all going to be okay, almost directly acknowledging that this relationship is destined to burn up and die one day, but hoping that she’ll let it last for another day or so, just a few more moments together before we all burn. It’s the kind of song that gets sadder on every listen, one that stands out as one of the most accomplished instances of Abel’s skill as a songwriter. It has to balance so many different elements within its placement on the album and as an individual single, and it succeeds at all of them, the last desperate swing at something better. It reminds me of when a relationship of mine ended, an unhealthy one that had stopped making me happy months before the final blow came. After the break-up, even though I knew it was futile and that it wouldn’t make me happy, I begged her to give us one more chance to try and make it work. It wasn’t romantic, it wasn’t what I wanted, it wasn’t based on anything but the fear of being alone, and that overtook every logical part of my brain. That’s what Save Your Tears reminds me most of, trying to cling onto a life raft that’s sinking instead of learning how to swim for yourself. 

There are few explicit details about this woman (or collection of women) across the album. Unlike on a project like House of Balloons, where Weeknd’s assortment of girls all have little details that separate them from each other, the centre of After Hours’ narrative and anguish doesn’t have anything to help her stand out, to help create an image of her in the listener’s mind. The narrative isn’t really about her as a person, or about a relationship that this persona of Abel Tesfaye even wants to cling onto, it’s about the fear of being alone at the end of existence. That’s why Faith includes those lines about wanting to be held as he dies, because this woman is the only person he’s allowed to get close enough to him to be worthy of that tragedy, and he doesn’t know how to cope with an existence that’s lonely again. It’s very interesting and feels purposeful that these more light hearted songs are positioned at this stage of the album. They’re most comparable with the original duo of seemingly incompatible tracks Hardest to Love and Scared to Live, songs that don’t initially seem like they fit into the core structure of the project. Yet, it’s interesting that Hardest to Love and Scared to Live are about the end of the relationship(s) and they take place in the intro, and the fantastical songs about love and the possibilities of happiness are right after the broken burnout. This basic subversion of album sequencing helps make the closing three songs stand out in their unrestricted bleakness, with the realities of pain beginning to sink into your flesh again. There is no happy ending or confrontation that it might all be okay in the end. For The Weeknd, it’s all fucked. 

Repeat After Me (Interlude) is the moment where denial slips back into the forefront of the character’s reality. The most explicitly mournful and broken song on the album, with Weeknd’s delivery lacking major enunciation and the production lacking any major flourishes. It’s the only track on the album which sounds like it was recorded on the floor of a bathroom, with its vocalist slumped against the wall barely being able to process his grief or despair. It’s most reminiscent of My Dear Melancholy, the six track EP that’s clearly written and performed in a time of great alienation and heartbreak, where the sounds are more minimal and the vocals are less polished. It’s a quiet, isolated few minutes that manages to tap into the discomforting heartache and tension of something like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse, with the pain of the protagonist feeling so palpable that the entire world around it seems to become an abyss. The lyrics are minimalistic, with only one real verse of note in between agonised repetition. The major idea of the interlude is about his belief that his ex, the woman of the album that’s become the project’s everything, doesn’t love the person she’s with now, that she still thinks of him when she fucks her new man. Instead of the measured and empathetic response of the earlier fantasy Scared to Live, this is pure wallowing, bitter reflections upon a reality that’s rapidly fading from existence. The core of the track is built around the lines “you don’t love him, you’re just fucking, it means nothing to me” and it’s clear from the first delivery that not a word of that is true. He is slurring and heartbroken, with every syllable sounding like it’s squeaked out of a closed up throat and the endless repetition makes it clear that he’s trying to talk himself into believing it. The line “it means nothing to me” is delivered with such callous weight, with Weeknd pronouncing the second half of nothing like the word is disintegrating on the tip of his tongue. For such a typically forceful and bombastic performer on the microphone, hearing him struggle to attest that her new relationship doesn’t hurt him is devastating. It’s the final stage of grief in some respects, in that it’s the acceptance that he’s incapable of moving on or drowning it out this time. He’s felt too much pain and made too many mistakes for it to be that simple. All he has now is the ability to succumb to one final darkness, without hiding any of his baggage or trying to pretend like it’ll make everything okay, just one more nightmarish journey before it stops forever. 

After Hours is the third song on the album which incorporates a major beat switch and the third single which is recontextualised by its sequencing on the LP. Unlike Alone Again or Escape from LA, After Hours’ switch comes relatively early on, with the drums and amplified vocals kicking in most prominently within a couple minutes of the six minute runtime. Similarly, unlike Heartless or Blinding Lights which are both grandiose escapes from the pain of heartbreak, After Hours isn’t escapism or a constructed fantasy. It is the weary acceptance that The Weeknd is alone, that the pain isn’t going away and that he just has to bear it out until he’s either able to heal or it kills him. After Hours is the first time it’s truly sounded like sex, drugs and wealth don’t even matter to Weeknd, there’s no point in it all, it doesn’t cover up the gaping hole in his heart. The closest the song comes to the emotional declarations of his previous break-up anthems are in the chorus, when the production increases in intensity and the words “baby, where are you now when I need you most?” amplify. Yet, even those words become reduced to nothingness by the end of the song, with the realisation that the desire is pointless becoming impossible to ignore as the song hits its climax. The song immediately opens with some of the most evocative lyricism of Weeknd’s career where he sings about thinking he’d almost died in his dreams again, and being brought back into a reality where he’s fighting for his life in another sense. This is the most confrontational and haunted of his break-up anthems, with the constant language of falling in too deep and being unable to sleep following her absence amplifying just how tired and drained he is. When the musical transition happens, it is not filled with catharsis or anger, just more contemplations on the darkest hours. He brings back the lyricism of dreams and being unable to sleep, bringing back the idea of the “man he used to be.”

While over the course of his career, Weeknd has recorded seemingly dozens of songs about excess being a bitter mistress, this is the most direct in how little satisfaction he gets from it. The disparity between the evocative language of “her body being a memory” to the blunt bleakness of “I felt so alone inside of this crowded room” immediately give the impression that he’s done trying to justify his own fixations. Unlike on Heartless which is a similar declaration of emotional despair and embrace of the worst impulses of his brain, this is the bitter resignation that there’s nothing more to do. Instead of blaming anything else, this is the song where The Weeknd fully accepts that it’s no one’s fault but his, repeating over and over again that he broke her heart, that he drove her away and that it’s nothing but his own burden to bear. This incorporates the suicidal imagery of previous songs such as Faith but in a much more reserved way, no impulses to hurt yourself, just the calm desire to never wake up again. The most painful lyric, maybe of his entire career, is “put myself to sleep, just so I can get closer to you inside my dreams” which is a lyric that stands out in so many different respects, whether talking about the allegorical message linking the album to suicide, or the more literal desperation of hoping that your dreams will let you see your person again. Without going into too much detail, it’s the lyric that encapsulates waiting to see if your partner will die, not getting to talk to them or be there besides them to wait for whatever fate entails, and finding any way you can to feel their presence with you, even if it all fades in the morning. The ending of the song where the repetition starts to sink in is a continuation of the thematic core of Repeat After Me, the desperation to keep the relationship intact, to get one final shot at it, even as Weeknd himself knows that it’s been over for a long time. The decision to sequence it right next to the end is the best structural decision of the record, as you realise that there’s nowhere left to go but hell.

Until I Bleed Out is the song where he realises it’s over and that there’s no redemption for their partnership. All the mistakes, the regrets and moments of cruelty have caught up to him and left consequences that are impossible to resolve are here. The constant theme of the album of drugs not being enough to dwarve the hurt this time is confronted directly. This is an angry, insidiously bleak song where he incorporates the previous imagery of wanting to die and to hurt himself in visceral details, singing about wanting to “gut you out of my dreams until I bleed out.” The desperation to find her in his dreams even if she’s not there in his reality from After Hours is gone, as the image of her only causes pain now, and he’s willing to destroy his entire being to get rid of those sights. The opening lines are viscerally upsetting, discussing his overwhelming fear and inability to move after finally confronting his own emotions. It doesn’t get much easier before the main lyrics of bleeding out kick in, with his depiction of not even wanting to touch the sky anymore crafting such a heartbreaking portrait of the way ambition slips through your fingers in times of despair. The saddest aspect of the major lyricism around his bleeding out is not just that he wants to die immediately, it’s that he expects to be in this anguish for the rest of his life, that the bleeding out is inevitable at whatever point it comes. There is such desperation in the final lines of the album, where he sings about continuing to tell himself that he “don’t need it anymore.” Over the course of the record, we hear his struggles at grappling with the woman whose love he has lost, the desires for the pain to extinguish violently or quietly, and the luster that endless drug use has lost over the decade. This line addresses all of them in a single sweep, a forceful belief that he doesn’t need this woman anymore and that he can live without her, that he doesn’t have to die for the pain to stop. However, I don’t view the closer as a record about dying, as The Weeknd character will continue for as long as Abel decides, but as a confirmation of relapse and the final piece of acceptance that he can’t cope with the weight of getting better. As the album ends, it becomes so clear that this persona is alone, that there’s no one coming for him, that he’s burned every bridge and is left with nothing but his own veins. It is heartbreaking and conveys some of the darkest moments of self-inflicted despair effortlessly. Like with My Dear Melancholy’s closer Privilege where Weeknd decides to abuse painkillers to “take the blues away”, Until I Bleed Out is a pessimistic closer that depicts its protagonist embracing drugs yet another time, even though the blues don’t fade anymore. No one knows where the persona of The Weeknd will go from here, but it’s unlikely to be a happy one. 

After Hours is the only record I’ve ever heard that captures the desire to hurt physically instead of emotionally, the occasional frenzied rush of catharsis and purpose that giving into your impulses creates and the struggles of being left with your broken body and broken mind at the end of the night. The worst part about physical harm, it doesn’t remove your mental anguish no matter how efficient your strikes are, it just leaves you crying on the floor with a bunch of wounds that weren’t there before. After Hours is never subtle in its descriptions of self inflicted violence, from talking about making his wrists bleed numerous times, to describing his bitter desire to overdose, to blatantly conveying a couple of attempts on his own life. Emotional pain transforming into physical almost seamlessly, the demons of your mind and soul convincing you to stay alone in agony. After Hours is the record where every impulse of your brain is jettisoning your body in different directions, passionate explosions of never-ending romantic love on In Your Eyes, hedonistic embrace of meaningless sex and drug abuse on Heartless, unbearable indescribable heartbreak of Repeat After Me, to the cryptic elliptical despair of the title track. It’s a record about all the emotions, all the sensations and all the consequences that come from choosing to let go of your control. Some people have the luxury of being able to walk around living without tight control and introspection, but the character of The Weeknd is not that kind. The pain catches up, you have to face it.

The persona of The Weeknd has changed violently over the years, with After Hours being the most obvious example of how the original mysterious other side of Abel Tesfaye has transformed and cracked. As his discography went on leading towards Starboy, the persona became closer to the idea of the person behind it, with more sincere emotion and personal lyricism being scattered across his output. When My Dear Melancholy came out, it was the moment it all seemed to end, an explicit EP about a real break-up that incorporated real facts about Abel’s own broken relationship, a collection of six songs that seemed to lack any of the distance or consistent themes of his catalogue. It was a very real expression of pain, at least to the extent that music can convey reality, and it could have either been an outlier or a commitment to a more personal direction away from songs like Party Monster or Reminder. Instead, After Hours is a combination of both of these directions, digging further into the persona than any record of his has to date, including the three Trilogy releases, but using that artifice to interrogate the nature of pain and truth through art. It keeps the more haunted pain of My Dear Melancholy but amplifies its anguish and shifts the framework around it, adding narrative structure and incorporating the fantastical elements of The Weeknd’s career, and manages to hit in an even more emotive and personal way than that EP. Through the persona of The Weeknd, Abel Tesfaye has managed to convey the inner heartbreak that comes from the lifestyle of the degenerate rich, and over the course of his career, has managed to find personal truth in the midst of the gigantic hair and glittering synths. Here, he’s stopped trying to contain it to the modern realities of club bathrooms and gorgeous penthouses. In doing so, he’s crafted the most heartfelt and honest depiction of how much it hurts to not be able to do a thing about your pain that I’ve ever heard. Artifice, like with some of the best documentaries and almost all the best music, reaches a profoundly honest truth. Abel Tesfaye seems like he’s doing okay, with the biggest hit song of the new decade, critical acclaim from everywhere but the Grammy Awards, a well received Super Bowl performance and an extreme amount of wealth. But The Weeknd will never be, it’ll always be there to represent the worst moments of his and our collective despair and hatred. As important as it is to find the bright side and embrace the happiness where we can, sometimes you just need to cry in a bathroom and articulate how it feels to want to hurt yourself. Holding it back doesn’t help, that’s what I’ve learned from meltdowns over the years, forcing them to go away leads to being drained and on edge for days to come. Sometimes you need to just breathe and relax, sometimes you’ve just got to fucking scream. Self-harm is never easy to talk about, the impulses of true despair are arguably even harder, and it looks different for everyone struggling with it. But The Weeknd makes it seem easier to think about, to confront and articulate by refusing to hide any of the hard details. The music will always be there when darkness feels like it’s all consuming, and reminds you that even if it is right now, that you’re not alone in the pitch black of night.