Recursion as resolution: The Weeknd’s magnum opus and the illusion of closure
On the chopping block today: Hurry Up Tomorrow by The Weeknd
I’ve been intimately familiar with The Weeknd’s discography ever since he started releasing music. I remember being in traffic with my dad in eighth or ninth grade, driving home from countless piano and music theory lessons, and gingerly taking over the aux to play Trilogy or Kiss Land. Arguably, highly inappropriate for a 14-year-old to be listening to – but thankfully, my dad’s English wasn’t quite advanced enough to process lyrics and melodies at the same time. (This battle with English might also explain how I got away with reading the Bridgerton series in middle school…)
Long drives with Dad have always been special to me, and they've cultivated some of my most formative moments. Whether it was wondering if God exists, what happens after we die, whether free will is real, or if there’s such a thing as universal morality, he never dismissed me. He entertained every thought, carefully watering my garden of curiosity. Once, when I was four or five, he famously organized a “tour of public transportation” day for the two of us because I had apparently pointed out earlier that week that I’d never been on a train or ferry. (I think about those memes that are like “doing xyz for my daughter so she isn’t impressed by your crusty son” … love you, Dad).
Bless him, he was also constantly exposed to my odd music taste, and since he is a true #ally of the people and has the patience of a saint, he usually refrained from commenting and just endured. Except for that one time during Covid, when he and I were driving eight hours from Bodrum to Istanbul, and I think I queued up two straight hours of choral music. He finally cracked and said, “Ececim, can we please return to some normal music? Like Dire Straits or something?”
As with all the “reviews” I write, I didn’t want this to be derivative of what’s already been said, or a song-by-song analysis. You can go to Pitchfork or Rolling Stone for that. And since I truly, wholeheartedly believe Hurry Up Tomorrow to be The Weeknd’s magnum opus, we will be exploring the album through that lens.
Okay. Let’s talk definition and framework first.
The Latin phrase “magnum opus” literally means “great work” and is rooted in both classical alchemy and broader cultural contexts. Alchemical philosophy was the dominant intellectual tradition in Europe from around 300 A.D. until the rise of modern science in the 17th and 18th centuries (yeah, I know, stay with me for a sec). Alchemists were obsessed with creating the Philosopher’s Stone through a four-step transformative process, which they called the magnum opus. This mythical stone was believed to be capable of turning base metals into gold and granting immortality through the Elixir of Life (read: infinite money glitch but make it Medieval). It is also interesting to note how enlightenment and superstition somehow coexisted, even within the same individual, well into the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Torchbearers of the movement, like Isaac Newton, were themselves practicing alchemists, even as their work dismantled the very foundations of witchcraft at the same breath.
But beyond all the metaphysics, the magnum opus is about something deeper: transformation. (“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous insect!!!” – sorry, I can’t not make the Kafka connection here.) Alchemists labored over this process in pursuit of spiritual and material perfection.
And that obsession to reach perfection, the drive to synthesize everything you know into a single, transcendent creation, still sits at the core of what we now call an artist’s magnum opus. It is the masterpiece that embodies the pinnacle of an artist’s achievement, like da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, or Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Without boring you too much, I will try to formally define the four key criteria that constructs a magnum opus, then do a bit of a comparative analysis between my dear friend J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor (BWV 232) and Hurry Up Tomorrow. This will also be a great excuse for me to (1) prove that my music degree did not amount to nothing (!!!!!), and (2) geek out about Bach, because honestly when am I not doing that…
Side note: I had the privilege of hearing The Monteverdi Choir perform this Mass in Carnegie Hall in 2023 and pretty much cried the entire time. Unfortunately, Gardiner was not conducting because earlier that year he ~allegedly~ punched a soloist during a concert because they accidentally left the stage from the wrong side (and that’s some classical music tea for you). For those of you unfamiliar, Gardiner is like 80 and a long time Bach scholar and a legendary conductor, which makes this whole ordeal a lot funnier.
Anyways. Let’s get into the criteria:
Criterion #1: Artistic totality
A magnum opus is not just a curated “Best Of” of album. It is the culmination of the styles, techniques, and themes an artist has explored across their career, woven into a single work that feels conclusive without being reductive. It’s like a living archive of their art.
Bach’s Mass in B minor showcases what this looks like through two deliberate methods: first, by blending multiple stylistic techniques such as Lutheran chorale writing, Catholic Mass traditions, and cosmopolitan European forms into a unified whole; and second, by reworking material from earlier compositions not out of laziness, but in a process of purposeful refinement. (The sheer volume and quality of Bach’s output are proof enough that he was anything but lazy – his ~200 surviving cantatas alone are testament to that.)
Take the Kyrie II and Christe eleison. The former is written in the stile antico, Palestrina-inspired a cappella polyphony that evokes the Renaissance tradition of sacred choral writing. The latter, by contrast, is a duet that wouldn’t be out of place in an Italian opera.
Many of the Mass’s movements originated in Bach’s earlier cantatas—some written decades prior. The Kyrie and Gloria, for example, come from a shorter Lutheran Mass he wrote in 1733 for the Dresden court, reused with minimal changes. The Crucifixus comes from a 1714 cantata (Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen BWV 12/2 – I am particularly partial to the sinfonia here; it’s beautiful and you should give it a listen). In its new context, Bach transposes the key, stretches the harmonic tension, and lands it right at the structural center of the Credo.
The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow poses a similar question: what does it sound like when I bring every version of myself into one album?
The non-stationarity of the human psyche is one of the most beautiful realities of being alive. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz once wrote, “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” As we move through life, as we shift, change, and grow, we don’t shed our past selves. Instead, we constantly gather new layers and get to carry old versions of ourselves. But we also carry the echoes of all which came before us. We are shaped by accrued memory – by everything civilization has ever tried to make sense of.
I think about the sandcastles I used to make as a child by dripping wet sand onto itself.
Hurry Up Tomorrow feels like that kind of sandcastle. It integrates all of The Weeknd’s past selves: the tortured hedonist of Trilogy, the glitzy nihilist of Starboy, and the purgatorial soul of Dawn FM.
Musically, the album is a Frankenstein of genres and musical influences: R&B, trap, Brazilian funk, and more. And yet it never feels disjointed. Cry For Me and São Paulo have an unmistakable undercurrent of Brazilian funk. The midway through shift in Given Up On Me, reminds me of Jhené Aiko’s None of Your Concern from her Chilombo album. Enjoy the Show opens with a Kanye-esque sample, whereas I Can’t Wait To Get There sounds straight out of a Tyler the Creator record (particularly his Flower Boy era).
Lyrically and thematically, the album obsesses over the concept of running out of time, of losing your voice, both literally and figuratively, and of not wanting to be in your own skin. I think what makes Hurry Up Tomorrow so special is how self-referential it is to The Weeknd’s entire discography. Certain phrases are stretched across almost a decade, now transformed by everything that he has been through over the years, like the reuse of “cry for me,” from Faith, and the twisting of “I can’t feel my face” into “I can’t feel my face anymore.” His fixation with “going back to LA” reappears, (“Cali is/was the mission” to “take me back to LA.”) These moments aren’t just easter eggs for super fans to identify. They’re leitmotifs. They’re fugue subjects. And the album is not just a departure from Abel’s The Weeknd persona, but a convergence of all the experiences that brought him here.
Criterion #2: Formal ambition
Magnum opuses (opi?) don’t play it safe. They take risks with scale, form, and structure, and demonstrate the artist’s aspiration to push boundaries to realize an overarching, often monumental, conceptual vision.
The Mass is a masterclass in this kind of formal architecture. While it draws from diverse materials composed over decades, it still exhibits strong internal unity, most notably through its palindromic structure. The Mass is bookended by the same melody, which is introduced in the Gratias agimus tibi of the Gloria and brought back in the Dona nobis pacem of the Agnus Dei. At its heart, of course, sits the Crucifixus (as it is written in the liturgical text.) This symmetry gives the Mass a sense of cyclical wholeness and reflects Baroque ideals of divine order. (Soli Deo Gloria!)
Hurry Up Tomorrow may not quote Gregorian chant, but it too is formally ambitious in a genre that rarely encourages it. It listens like a film. It is dramatic, sweeping, and tightly sequenced. There’s an overture-like, orchestral quality to the opening track, Wake Me Up, and the transitions feel deliberate as songs flow into each other.
Like Bach, The Weeknd ties the edges of the album together. Melodic motifs reappear mid-track or re-emerge in other songs. For example, Wake Me Up ends with a descending lament tetrachord which drags you under, dropping you in front of the gates of hell (see the next criterion for how Bach utilizes the same musical concept – it all connects! How cool is it being able to draw a throughline across 300 years?) The same descending line is called back at the end of Big Sleep, so much more dramatic this time. Then, the way Baptized in Fear, Open Hearts, and Opening Night bleed into each other feels like one continuous movement. The dance break in Open Hearts is unexpected and euphoric, yet never out of place.
If you are listening to this album in shuffle mode, you are truly doing something wrong. This album demands to be heard in sequence, in order to be fully understood and appreciated.
The first time I encountered an un-shufflable, conceptually and formally cohesive, front-to-back album was through Pink Floyd’s The Division Bell in middle school (wow… a lot of middle school references today. To be fair, most of their albums and a lot of other albums do this, as I would later discover.) But I loved how songs bled into each other, and how the entire record basically felt like a single, unfolding composition. I think this resonated so deeply with me because of my classical training – it was like hearing progressive/psychedelic rock through the lens of a multi-movement work, like a sonata or a symphony.
The point is: this album is not just written or produced – it is architected. It knows where it starts and where it wants to return to, which is exactly what a magnum opus formally aspires to be.
Criterion #3: Emotional/philosophical depth
I think this one is pretty self explanatory. A magnum opus aspires to evoke profound feelings and questions in its listener (and its performer, in the classical music context.)
In the Mass, Bach achieves this through deliberate tone/word painting. He builds a rich emotional language based on the liturgical text itself, encoding meaning into chromatic lines and dissonant suspensions. The Crucifixus (yeah, I’m talking about this movement for the 3rd time) is built on a passacaglia bass (also called the lament tetrachord) that traces a descending chromatic fourth across thirteen repetitions. This feels like the procession march towards crucifixion (see: Raphael’s Il Spasimo below). Above the walking bass line, the upper voices sigh in suspiratio (literally “sigh” motifs). The final cadence into G major on the phrase “et sepultus est” (“and was buried”) offers a flash of harmonic clarity – a tonal resurrection, marking the pivot from death to hope.
Hurry Up Tomorrow reaches for the same kind of emotional and spiritual stakes, but through the tools of our time: autotune, synth pads, distorted vocals, and lyrical confession. The Weeknd’s last three albums map surprisingly well onto Dante’s Divine Comedy. In this framing, After Hours is the Inferno: a descent into hedonism, self-destruction, and guilt. Dawn FM is Purgatorio: a kind of liminal zone where he’s guided through regret and memory by a version of Jim Carrey as a soft-spoken, FM-radio Virgil. And Hurry Up Tomorrow? That’s his Paradiso.
The album is unabashedly honest. We get to observe The Weeknd as he finally deals with his innermost demons, with what it means to be caught in your own cognitive dissonances and contradictions (It’s better when I’m by myself/I hate it when I’m by myself). There’s Big Sleep, which feels like the album’s Crucifixus. That same descending lament is back but now delivered with a synthesized choir. One of my favorite moments in the album happens at the transition from Niagara Falls into Take Me Back to LA. It feels like an ascent – there’s a lift in the production that lines up with the lyrics: “Set my heart on fire / I lost my life / Going back in time.” It's a moment that genuinely feels transcendent, like ascending through the sphere of fire.
Criterion #4: Legacy-making intent (whether consciously or not)
Legacy-making intent involves the artist’s conscious or unconscious effort to create a work that will endure beyond their lifetime. A magnum opus exists in Vollkommenheit (perfection) and Vollstimmigkeit (full voice), it is complete in and of itself, and says everything the artist needs to say, all at once.
There is something poetic about the fact that Bach never heard the Mass in B minor performed in full. He finished composing it just a year before his death, and its “impractical length” (a whopping 2 hours!!) made it unusable for typical liturgical settings. To me, this suggests a purpose beyond functionality, maybe akin to The Art of Fugue, which was a borderline obsessive intellectual exploration of all contrapuntal possibilities that can be unraveled from a single fugue subject (unfortunately it remained unfinished at the time of his death.)
I think of the Mass as Bach’s true Nekrolog. Not the actual Nekrolog, which was the dry obituary published after his death by his son C.P.E. Bach (a.k.a. the O.G. sad boy) and one of his pupils. But a musical self-eulogy. Gardiner, in his book Music in the Castle of Heaven, notes that we know remarkably little about Bach the man. Unlike many composers of his caliber, he left behind no intimate family correspondence or letters. At one point, he was even invited to submit a biography and declined. His official Nekrolog feels like a husk, in the way it reduces Bach to a list of achievements. And yet, in the Mass in B Minor, we encounter a paradox: a work that is both impersonal and deeply revealing – a true Nekrolog in musical form.
The Weeknd has been clear in that he’s retiring the moniker, which definitively makes Hurry Up Tomorrow a kind of farewell. This changes how you hear everything. This is his final statement, his Nekrolog in a way. The callbacks to old works, the full-circle structure that ties all the way back to High For This, the references that echo back a decade, it’s all deliberate. This is a retrospective disguised as a forward-facing record. The album opens a door for a new, fresh beginning for Abel Tesfaye the man, but it’s also locking one behind him. And then there is the scale – 90 minutes long, densely layered, heavy with intent (remind you of someone else? Another work that is “impractical in length,” perhaps?)
If you were looking for legacy-making intent, there it is.
Recursion as resolution. That’s how The Weeknd chose to close the book on a decade-long journey. And that’s what makes Hurry Up Tomorrow a magnum opus—whether we’re ready to say goodbye or not.
Overall album score: 9.5/10
Musicality/lyricism: 9/10
Production: 10/10
Cohesion: 10/10
Cultural significance/impact: 9/10
Album release date: Jan 31, 2025