The Weeknd is not a subtle experience. He sings hits about erotic asphyxiation and doing face-numbing amounts of drugs; he smothers his face in bandages until you can only see his eyes. He played a caricature of himself in Uncut Gems and for years after he clung onto “The Character,” as Abel Tesfaye called it, speaking in third person for interviews. And so it did not come as a shock when he rolled out Hurry Up Tomorrow, the album he’s claimed is his last, with billboards that announced THE END IS NEAR and interviews about how he wants to “kill” his pop-star persona.

He makes that death thuddingly literal on his sixth record, detailing the twitch of his toes as he drowns in the bath, underscoring his pledge to overdose with sound effects of sloshing liquids and rattling pills. Seconds into the album, he starts taking stock of his legacy, before the track springs into the sound of “Thriller” rising from the grave. The true horror in any Weeknd song is the sense that something nefarious is happening just out of frame: the pill pushed into a palm, the moan behind a locked door, the threat of running out of time. But Hurry Up Tomorrow leaves no mystery or suspense. We know the stakes from the start: These are his last lines.

The result is an opulent, elegant, and occasionally exasperating farewell. This is the Weeknd’s most expansive-sounding album that’s also narrowly focused. Even as he swerves from Brazilian funk to rapturous ballads to incandescent synth-pop, he keeps returning to one night from 2022, when he lost his voice mid-song during a Los Angeles concert and had to cancel the show. You cannot get more than a few songs through this 22-track album without the Weeknd tugging you back to that night, in clunky asides about his voice cracking, in a skit in which he shouts, “I CAN’T FUCKING SING,” in lines about his “failing” voice.

Maybe the Weeknd is weeping because there are no more worlds left to conquer. He whines about how fame is a disease. He scolds a “chronically online” love interest for picking a fight on the opening night of his tour. But then there’s the euphoric blitz of synths that bursts through “Open Hearts,” the shimmering chorus in “Give Me Mercy,” the golden-lit “Niagara Falls,” the thudding chords from electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder on “Big Sleep.” There are sublime stretches—unhurried, undulating verses, plush synths, precise images—punctuated by the occasional groaner as he grounds us back in his own misery. All this grandeur turns out to be in the service of something comparatively small: Touring is hard. The Weeknd is tired.

Hurry Up Tomorrow shows off his versatility, oscillating between the murky, muddy soundscape that defined his first Trilogy and the gleaming disco-flecked pop that has buoyed his last few releases. He stuffs the album with surprises: We get both the gloriously sludgy “Reflections Laughing,” with Travis Scott’s pitched-down vocals echoing through the void, and the neon buzz when Justice crash into “Wake Me Up.” But the album achieves real drama when entropy kicks in: when Lana Del Rey’s vocals ricochet and reverberate at the end of “The Abyss,” when the frictive interlude “Until We’re Skin and Bones” hurtles into warp speed, when “Sao Paolo” spins out into a dancefloor panic attack. Hurry Up Tomorrow always seems like it’s about to lurch out of your grasp. The vertigo is the thrill.

At 84 minutes, the album is undeniably bloated, but it charges forward in part because the transitions glide so seamlessly from one track to the next. Credit Oneohtrix Point Never—who returns from his work on 2022’s Dawn FM and 2020’s After Hours—and Mike Dean—who returns from his work on 2023’s flummoxing music to HBO’s The Idol—as co-producers to enhance and sharpen every second of the synth and drum programming. Their touch, along with a coterie of other A-list producers and songwriters, make the whole album sound ready for an IMAX theater. No wonder Tesfaye is starring in a feature-length thriller coming out in May tied to the album, also called Hurry Up Tomorrow.

While what happens in the extended universe remains to be seen, the album itself is most successful when he steps away from litigating how awful it is to be famous. He brands himself a sinner and keeps reminding himself he’s 34 now, old enough to lose his tolerance and worry about drugs revving up his heart—old enough, supposedly, to have brittle bones, as he claims on the grandiose “Without a Warning.” “I should have been sober, but I can’t afford to be boring,” he sings—a startlingly clear assessment from the man who once chanted, “When I’m fucked up, that’s the real me.” That self-awareness shines through “Enjoy the Show,” the album’s emotional centerpiece. “I just want to die when I’m at my fuckin’ peak,” he coos. He studies himself from a distance: his face bloated in the 3 a.m. light, tweaking “like a middle-aged child star,” and by the time Future comes in to gurgle, “I can’t feel my face anymore,” the callback of all callbacks, both men sound anguished. The track is a spiritual successor to “Tell Your Friends,” an underrated highlight from Beauty Behind the Madness—on both songs, the Weeknd collapses himself down to just how little he can offer anyone else. He’s an anecdote for the group chat, a fleeting spectacle, a haggard reflection glinting off a glass table.

It’s that clarity that leads the Weeknd into his final act: apologizing. “I hope my confession is enough,” he begs on the closing track as a power-ballad piano line builds underneath him—but the song slips cleanly into the opening seconds of “High for This,” the first track from House of Balloons, the opening chapter of his first Trilogy. All that mechanical repentance, all the elaborate ways he’s promised to move on, mean nothing when the cycle starts back up. The Weeknd has always presented annihilation as a kind of benediction, self-destruction as the most legible impulse. An object in motion stays in motion; a “Party Monster” stays at the party; a man who constructed an entire album about a slow drive through purgatory pleads for heaven and then winds up exactly where he started: dead-eyed in the clammy dark, waiting for another night to begin.