At the beginning of October, The Weeknd took some time during his radio show, Memento Mori, to reveal that his upcoming album, The Dawn, is finished.
The “In Your Eyes” singer didn’t reveal when The Dawn would be released, but after more than a year of anticipation following After Hours, fans were pleased to have a concrete update from The Weeknd himself.
In a recent cover story with Billboard, to celebrate “Blinding Lights” becoming the publication’s #1 charting song of all-time, Abel elaborated on the updated he provided last month, and described exactly what The Dawn means to him.
“Picture the album being like the listener is dead,” he told Billboard. “And they’re stuck in this purgatory state, which I always imagined would be like being stuck in traffic waiting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. And while you’re stuck in traffic, they got a radio station playing in the car, with a radio host guiding you to the light and helping you transition to the other side. So it could feel celebratory, could feel bleak, however you want to make it feel, but that’s what The Dawn is for me.”
The Weeknd continued, and revealed that those celebratory and bleak moments are channeled into a handful of different sounds that drive the album.
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“You’ll hear EDM, hip-hop, and three other types of sounds in one song—and somehow, we make it work,” he said.
While the hype for The Dawn grows, the fact remains that we have yet to receive any semblance of a release date, and with the sustained success of After Hours, it’s not like The Weeknd needs to be in any rush to drop a new album. But the more he talks about it, and breathes life into what has previously just been a title and a handful of Instagram posts, it’s hard not to convince yourself that The Dawn is just around the corner.
What do you think of Abel’s description of his new album? Let us know down in the comments.