Fresh off the release of his fifth studio album Dawn FM, The Weeknd appears to already be teasing new material.
The Toronto artist took to Twitter on Monday to say we are in fact in the midst of a “new trilogy.”
“i wonder… did you know you’re experiencing a new trilogy?” he wrote.
Trilogy, of course, is the title of The Weeknd’s 2012 compilation album that gathered all three of his 2011 mixtapes—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—into one remastered package. As such, some fans began to theorize that Abel Tesfaye’s next album will serve as the third project in this “new trilogy,” following 2020’s After Hours and Dawn FM. He directly linked the two back at the Billboard Music Awards in May 2021, saying, “I just want to say the After Hours are done and the dawn is coming.”
The reveal arrives just days after The Weeknd dropped his latest LP, which brought in 60 million streams on Spotify in its first 24 hours, and is projected to earn somewhere between 150,000 and 170,000 equivalent album units in its first week.
The 16-track Dawn FM features guest appearances from Jim Carrey, Tyler, the Creator, Lil Wayne, Quincy Jones, and Oneohtrix Point Never. On the production side of things, The Weeknd relied heavily on Max Martin, Matt Cohn, OPN, and Oscar Holter.
2020’s After Hours spawned Abel’s biggest song to date, “Blinding Lights,” which became the longest-charting song in Billboard Hot 100 history at 90 weeks.
