THE Weeknd has teased his new album with a cryptic video that fans cannot stop replaying.
After months of build-up, The Weeknd posted a three-minute video packed full of clues about his upcoming album, late Monday on Instagram.
The Idol actor captioned the haunting teaser “unprepared certainty…” that appears to be the title of the album.
The animated clip begins with the visual of a young boy standing in front of a deserted house as a storm gathers above it.
A sense of uneasiness follows the boy – likely depicting the musician’s younger self – as he walks through different rooms of the abandoned building.
He is led down to a grandfather clock that turns back time, as The Weeknd’s avatar is transported to a church where he finds himself staring into a mirror.
The video ends in a moment of surprising serenity as the young boy finds himself in the embrace of a hooded woman, when the lights fade out.
The teaser is set to unreleased music from the album, as fans flooded the comments section urging the Canadian superstar to “drop the album” while praising the clip as a “cinematic experience.”
“Every artist might as well go sit down, he’s about to drop,” a fan comment read.
“I have no words, the new era is finally happening,” another Instagram user wrote.
“I’m gonna lose it,” a third person commented. “Seriously.”
A fourth person said they were “crying tears at 5 in the morning” after watching the teaser that has over 637,000 likes and 13,000 comments at the time of writing.
It has the same visual style as an earlier video The Weeknd shared on Instagram, with a mysterious caption, “when you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you…”
Fans on a Reddit forum dedicated to The Weeknd predicted the Grammy winner is getting ready to release the first single from his new album on Friday.
“We’re definitely getting a single on Friday,” one user declared. “This teaser just feels a lot more special than the others, as if something important were coming.”
Others began decoding the many Easter Eggs that The Weeknd has inevitably worked into the teaser clip, including a reference to his debut mixtape House of Balloons that was released in 2011.
The album I’m working on now is probably my last hurrah as The Weeknd. This is something that I have to do. As The Weeknd, I’ve said everything I can say.
The Weeknd to W Magazine
House of Balloons is the nickname of the Toronto home where The Weeknd lived during the early days of his music career.
He explained the significance of its moniker in a 2015 interview with Rolling Stone, adding, “We’d throw these s***ty parties and have girls over, and we’d try to make it celebratory, so we’d have balloons.”
END OF AN ERA
Redditors theorized his latest body of work will at once pay tribute to his career while also reinventing himself from the ground up, as the house in the video was littered with deflated balloons.
“YOOOOOO THE HOUSE OF BALLOONS WITH ALL THE DEFLATED BALLOONS?! ALL THE PAST ABELS? I F***ING KNEW HE WAS GONNA SHOW THEM, LETS GOOOOO,” one Redditor wrote.
The Weeknd began teasing a new musical era in January, when he suggested his sixth record would be the final instalment of a trilogy that began with After Hours and continued with Dawn FM.
In a post on Instagram, he shared the album covers from 2020 and 2022 respectively, followed by a photo with a question mark.
The caption for the post read: “3”.
In an interview with W magazine, he also shared that the upcoming album is “probably my last hurrah as The Weeknd.”
“This is something that I have to do. As The Weeknd, I’ve said everything I can say.”
