Currently, The Weeknd, also known by his legal name Abel Tesfaye, has a pretty busy slate this summer. Along with his new HBO series The Idol airing new episodes each week, with accompanying weekly song releases for its soundtrack, The Weeknd is also on the European/Latin America/Asia leg of his After Hours Til Dawn international tour.
Videos by American Songwriter
While in Stockholm this past weekend for a show, he gave an interview to Variety to discuss all of the above, including a new album he’s planning to release soon. First, though, he decided to clarify where The Idol soundtrack fits in his discography, and whether it could be considered a studio album or not.
“It is and it isn’t, it’s very collaborative and it’s also episodic,” he said. “They’re little EPs, it’s music per episode. So they’re like little mini albums, instead of one body of work.”
Back in early 2022, just after he dropped his January LP Dawn FM, The Weeknd had already begun hinting at a new full-length release. Some fans believed that The Idol soundtrack fulfilled what he was referring to, but in this new conversation, the singer insists that he was talking about a completely separate project.
“No, that was for something else,” he said. “That’s around the corner.”
Touching more on this next album, yet to be given a title or release date, The Weeknd explained that it will complete the trilogy of albums that began with After Hours in 2020 and continued with Dawn FM.
“I’m finishing the third part of this of this saga, of this trilogy,” he said.
When he first announced that he was in the middle of an album trilogy via Twitter last January, fans began to speculate what the name of the third addition would be called. The most popular theory among his fanbase was that it was to be titled After Life, as the entire trilogy would be a reference to the feeling of death. However, The Weeknd shot down these rumors.
“The name of it will come out soon, but it’s not called what some fans think it’s called,” he said. “What they think it’s called is actually a song on the album, but that’s not what the actual album is called. I’m just gonna say that.”
Photo by Paras Griffin/Getty Images
