Starboy by The Weeknd
Starboy is the third studio album by Canadian singer and songwriter The Weeknd. It was released on November 25, 2016, by XO and Republic Records. The album features guest appearances from Daft Punk, Lana Del Rey, Future, and Kendrick Lamar. The album was supported by three singles: "Starboy", "I Feel It Coming" and "Party Monster". Starboy received generally positive reviews from critics and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 348,000 album-equivalent units, including 209,000 traditional album sales in the first week. It also debuted at number one on Billboard's Canadian Albums Chart. After the commercial success of his album Beauty Behind the Madness in 2015, The Weeknd hinted at the release of his third studio album on March 12, 2016, with his Instagram calling it the next "chapter" to his music. On August 24, 2016, The Weeknd was confirmed by the Republic Records executive vice president Wendy Goldstein to be collaborating with the French electronic dance duo Daft Punk, during an interview with Billboard. On September 7, 2016, the album was confirmed to be in production from an interview with VMAN, with influence taken from Prince, The Smiths, Talking Heads and Bad Brains. On September 21, 2016, the album overall and its title was officially announced, with its release slated for November 25, 2016. The album's sleeve is photographed and designed by Nabil Elderkin. It features The Weeknd with shorter hair in a crouched pose with a cross necklace and is highlighted by streaks of blue neon across a neon red background. The top of the picture says the album's name in yellow lettering and the edges of the packaging are grained by the blue neon.
On what was meant to be the last date of his 2022 tour, The Weeknd took the stage at Inglewood, California’s SoFi Stadium, but when he opened his mouth to sing for 80,000 screaming fans, nothing came out. Over the past 14 years, Abel Tesfaye has experienced what you might call pop’s glow-up of the century: When he emerged from obscurity as the faceless voice behind 2011’s noir-ish <i>House of Balloons</i> mixtape, nobody could have guessed that he’d be headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show a decade later. But that moment onstage triggered what Tesfaye has since described as a breakdown, inspiring a period of intense reflection on his life and career—and <i>Hurry Up Tomorrow</i>, his sixth studio album. Tesfaye has called <i>Tomorrow</i> the final chapter in the trilogy he began with 2020’s <i>After Hours</i>, the album that launched him into a new stratosphere of pop success, and continued with 2022’s high-concept <i>Dawn FM</i>. Continuing the narrative of its semi-autobiographical narrator’s journey through a dark night of the soul, <i>Tomorrow</i> doubles as an allegory about fame’s power to destroy: The curtain rises, and it’s all downhill from there. He longs for a time “when my blood never tasted like wine,” he wails over the night-drive synth-pop of “Take Me Back to LA”, and diagnoses fame as a disease on the glittering “Drive”. He’s ready to leave it all behind on “Wake Me Up”, a collaboration with French duo Justice: “No afterlife, no other side,” he sings, sounding entranced by the thought. Its 22 tracks play out like the swan song to end all swan songs, joined by a murderer’s row of guests: Future lends a layer of scuzz to the deceptively sweet R&B slow-burner “Enjoy the Show”, Anitta taps in for the nocturnal baile funk of “São Paulo” and frequent collaborator Lana Del Rey makes an appearance on “The Abyss”, where ominous lyrics like, “What’s the point of staying? It’s going up in flames” hit even harder after LA’s devastating fires in January 2025. Tesfaye has dropped repeated hints that this album won’t just close out the trilogy, but also his existence as The Weeknd. If that’s the case, “Without a Warning” encapsulates the arc of an artist who never let success get in the way of his ambition: “Take me to a time/When I was young/And my heart could take the drugs and heartache without loss/But now my bones are frail/And my voice fails/And my tears fall without a warning/Either way, the crowd will scream my name.”
