The Weeknd Teases New Music, Next Chapter of ‘After Hours’ / ‘Dawn FM’ Trilogy in Elaborate New Video

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music The Weeknd doesn’t do anything by half, and a day after he announced a September concert in Brazil that will feature a “never-before-seen production,” he dropped an elaborate video teaser of what his next project will look and sound like — and it’s the third and final chapter in his “After Hours” / “Dawn FM” / TBD trilogy, which he hinted to Variety last year will have a visual component, possibly a film, as well; the new video concludes with the written words, “There are three chapters in this tale.” The minute-plus-long clip, posted in his Instagram story, is a surreal series of dream-like images from the last four years of his musical career: There’s the sports car, poker thee, red suit and sunglasses and sports car he sported in “Blinding Lights” and the other videos from his blockbuster 2020 “After Hours” album, segueing into the old man imagery from “Dawn FM,” then the hooded characters featured in his “After Hours Til the Dawn” tour, and then new elements come in.

There’s a character, possibly a mannequin, wearing a mask that looks very much like his own face (he wore a lot of masks on the tour) and, in the conclusion, a character that looks like him as a young boy, surrounded by a horde of white mannequins reaching for him.

Throughout, hazy music plays, largely synthesizers and massed Weeknd vocals, which are presumably blurry remixes of new (and possibly older) material.

The clip concludes with a ray of sunlight hitting the boy’s head and spreading out as grass and flowers grow, adding up to a fairly obvious death-redemption-rebirth theme.