The Weeknd’s Hurry Up Tomorrow features Giorgio Moroder. Those eight words alone might be enough of a gushing review, the shortest I’d ever write. Do you need to know anything else about the new album besides the presence of the pioneering heavenly father of disco who sent Donna Summer’s divine voice levitating into outer space? Listening to Hurry Up Tomorrow before the names of contributors appeared on Spotify, my ears pricked up at the sound of a spectral voice filtered through a vocoder reciting the kiddo prayer “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” a little over mid-way through the dramatic, cathartically overblown death march “Big Sleep.” It can’t be, I thought. It IS. The 84-year-old composer and producer did, in fact, grace the song with his futuristic presence, a perfect match considering the theatrical electronica orchestra, over which The Weeknd’s vocals soar, owes a lot to the more extreme ends of Moroder’s career, namely his maniacally berserk score for Midnight Express, which has always reminded me of a magic show gone rogue.

“Big Sleep” doesn’t stand alone. Moroder’s influence looms large on Hurry Up Tomorrow—a disco daddy foil for all the atoning lyrical themes of gratitude and apologies to Mama. This starts instantly with the somber intro to the opening track “Wake Me Up” that directly reinterprets Moroder’s melodramatic kingpin Scarface score before switching to a bouncy 80s-style “Thriller”-interpolated bop, in which the nihilistic and even, gothic lyrics clash with the uptempo bounce (“Sun is never rising. I don’t know if it’s day or night. And I can’t find the horizon. I’m running out of time”). The Moroder tributes go beyond direct references. Though Hurry Up Tomorrow may have a slightly more diverse sound than The Weeknd’s typical pop-R&B-trip-hop fusion, especially with the warped bender take on Brazilian funk in “São Paulo,” including the filthy Portuguese rantings of Anitta, the album mimics Moroder’s electro extremity by pushing The Weeknd’s trademark synth-heavy style as far and aggressive as it will go as if the zooming cacophony of “Every Angel is Terrifying” on Dawn FM exploded outward. This synth-forward sound is partially thanks to the contributions and production input of stoner synth legend and The Idol’s breakout star Mike Dean and Oneohtrix Point Never. Dean, who has worked on many landmark albums, including Ye’s still-groundbreaking Yeezus, has called Hurry Up Tomorrow “the best album I ever made,” just in time to preempt his former collaborator’s 72-hour X rant, dentist office Superbowl ad, and Yeezy swastika shirt. Mike might be right. Revisiting The Weeknd’s previous albums, even the two that make up this current trilogy–my beloved radio-scrolling drive through purgatory Dawn FM and the fall-from-heaven Vegas hellscape After Hours–Hurry Up Tomorrow’s rich production and turned-up-to-11 synths make those feel a tad wan. In comparison, the synths here are sometimes so over-the-top they may as well have come from Christmas maniac Mannheim Steamroller or theatrical terrorist Andrew Lloyd Webber. This is not an insult.

However, the biggest takeaway from iconic Moroder-produced projects may be the ascendent transitions between songs. One of the most satisfying parts of Donna Summer’s albums is the seamless transitions between songs. Just try not to be awed by the shift of sax rock “Hot Stuff” to the naughty beep-beep of “Bad Girls” or, my favorite, “Dim All The Lights” merging into the knocking beat of “Journey to the Center of Your Heart.” Oooh, it gets me every time. That same ecstatic feeling can be found on Hurry Up Tomorrow, the best being between “Baptized in Fear” and “Open Hearts.” “Baptized in Fear” is a narcotic anthem for drowning in the bathtub (“I fell asleep in the tub, I was met with paralysis…All the times I dodged death, this can’t be the way it ends, no!”) and brain-dying hallucinations (“Figure in the corner I can’t quite see, I just know the shadow’s staring at me”) that concludes with the potentially hopeful choir of layered vocals calling “Voices they tell me that I should carry on.” This choral moment swells right into the swirling beat of “Open Hearts,” an opening up of the sound as if you’re heading through a tunnel and towards the light. It’s like an emergence into heaven–or a new-wavy dance song, filled with angels and braving newfound love. Close enough.

Sure, drowning in a tub, despite being the final exit for many stars before him, is certainly an unexpectedly grim scene to paint for a popular music album. This imagery repeats a few times throughout Hurry Up Tomorrow, from the “Don’t you let me down if you let me drown” chant with Florence Welch on “Reflections Laughing” and the final title track’s devastating “Now, I’m drowning in the same tub where I learned how to swim.” Not to mention the use of drowning as a metaphor for swimming in booze/drugs as in the slurping responses to Chxrry22’s concerned phone call (“I’m just worried, you worked so hard to be better. And now you’re back, drowning in that shit”) that breaks up “Reflections Laughing.” Depressing dissolution is not exactly new thematic territory for The Weeknd. Since his three insurgent mixtapes that put him on the musical map, The Weeknd has carved out a persona as a decadent douchebag teetering on the precipice of total cataclysmic substance-fueled collapse and public passive suicide while being fully aware of its inherent emptiness and certain coming doom. To bring back Andrew Lloyd Webber, my cousin and I have a running joke comparing The Weeknd to a 21st-century Phantom of the Opera, trading the dry-iced fog tunnels under a Parisian opera house to doing lines in the dark with anonymous hotties in a drafty Bel Air mansion. And his recent shrouded Grammy performance done almost entirely in the dark with red body-suited dancers emerging from a pit into a body pile à la Antichrist doesn’t exactly dispel that image. I’m going to start a lobbying campaign for a Weeknd/Phantom adaptation.

Hurry Up Tomorrow mines this same bloated-faced, strung-out, unraveling party monster in a penthouse prison territory, particularly through the four-song run of “Opening Night,” “Reflections Laughing,” “Enjoy The Show,” and “Given Up On Me,” which all blend at some point so I have trouble telling each one apart other than when I hear Travis Scott rather than Future. Things do get particularly dark on the show-must-go-on “Enjoy The Show” as The Weekend describes his pathetic state: “Like a middle-aged child star, way I’m fucking tweakin’” Things don’t usually end so well for those burned-out child stars yet the following song offers a twist. “Given Up on Me” begins with a dreamy, distorted sample of Nina Simone singing “Wild is the Wind,” notably also covered by the paranoid, cocaine-addled, malnourished Thin White Duke-era David Bowie on Station to Station. I highly doubt The Weekend missed that additional reference as he also seems like he’s holed up, gakked-up in an LA mansion as the song opens with an admission, “I’ve been lying to your faces. I’ve been always wasted. It’s too late to save me.” Lest you think this is another one of those goddamn sad star-boy songs, though one with a notably scrunchy face-worthy groove, The Weeknd abruptly changes course. After a chanting sample from Chicago Gangsters, the song, with the return of Simone’s “Wild is the Wind” piano, turns into a ballad, yearning for the sunshine and mercy delivered from either a lady or, more likely given later songs on the album, the Lord.

Yes, unlike, well all of The Weeknd’s other albums, there is a possibility for redemption here. There is relief and acceptance in falling to your knees and begging for mercy like in Toto’s “Africa”-resembling “Give Me Mercy,” which has to be the closest thing to Christian contemporary The Weeknd has ever released (No judgment here, I’m also a Nick Cave fan). This is quite a whiplash-inducing change from this trilogy’s first album After Hours, which featured an entire song about losing faith. “Give Me Mercy” and “Faith” aren’t the only tracks that echo each other, righting the wrongs of earlier albums. The wistful sunlight warmth of “Take Me Back to LA” is a throwback to the rejected chill of “Escape from LA” on After Hours. Like that wishy-washy relationship with Los Angeles (a feeling I’m sure all fellow New Yorkers also recognize), a perspective—or even, theological—shift happens within Hurry Up Tomorrow itself. The album is bookended by two different accounts of the afterlife, from the morose “no afterlife, no other side” on the opener “Wake Me Up” to the glimpse of the pearly gates (“So I see heaven after life. I want heaven when I die”) on the final song, “Hurry Up Tomorrow.”

There is a catch though. To get within arms-length of redemption, you may have to go through hell to get there—lose your voice like a fairytale princess like in the panicked interlude “I Can’t Fucking Sing,’ which references an actual incident in which The Weeknd lost his voice at SoFi Stadium and got booed by assholes in the crowd; overdose and die in a tub; endure an unnecessarily prominent Playboi Carti feature; kill off your persona (this is quite possibly the last album under The Weeknd moniker); apologize like hell to your mother who you hurt and disappointed; leap into the Lana Del Rey’s moaning abyss with her “A-haa” siren song (The Weeknd clearly reminded Lana that she could use her diaphragm while singing. For this, Saint Abel must be canonized); and withstand an album that ballooned to an hour and twenty-four minutes long. For the latter, other critics have moaned about the album’s bloated length. Did Hurry Up Tomorrow need to be the length of a feature film? Perhaps, especially since there is a forthcoming film with the same title co-written by and starring The Weeknd (Please, please, please let it be a trash classic like the much unfairly maligned The Idol). Sure, some songs don’t seem as necessary. “Drive” comes to mind with its naff repetitive lyrics “I just wanna drive! I just wanna drive!” like a future car commercial. I’ll forgive it–a fluffy toss-off is a breath of fresh air within all the darkness. And hey—did Donna Summer’s songs with Giorgio Moroder like “Love to Love You, Baby” need to be 17 minutes long? Probably not, but aren’t we so glad it was? To-muchness has never posed a problem for me.

Good thing, considering Hurry Up Tomorrow feels even longer given certain songs slam together multiple disparate parts. Similar to Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft, I’m never quite sure where certain songs are going. As often as I’ve listened to the crooning nostalgic romanticism of “Niagara Falls,” I’m shocked when I reach the time warp at the end. These multi-part trips also account for perhaps the best song on the album and one of the best—and certainly the most personal—The Weeknd has ever produced: “Red Terror,” named after the mass killings and political oppression in late 1970s Ethiopia, where his family is from. “Red Terror” begins with a moving account of his mother’s emigration from Ethiopia to Canada and raising him as a child. The song is mostly sung from her perspective with his own voice breaking in to howl “Sorry, Mama,” until the outro when he recites a section of Henry Scott-Holland’s poem “Death Is Nothing At All” (“Death is nothing at all, it does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room”). This poetry reading could easily act as the end of the album as it feels like a funeral and leaves us with a request to “Call me by the old familiar name,” referencing Abel Tesfaye finally burying the character of The Weeknd.

But death is not the end, tomorrow’s coming, and in heaven everything is fine. The actual conclusion of the album is far more transcendent if you know your ethereal whooshing. After the angelic synthy choir and heartfelt churchy confessional of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” a title taken from The Nu’rons’ lovey overture sampled in the previous triumphant “Without a Warning,” the song fades into a gusty hissing void like a running vacuum cleaner—or a radiator. That breezy wind is reminiscent of the squall before the Lady in the Radiator’s song “In Heaven” in David Lynch’s Eraserhead. An avowed cinephile, The Weeknd has ripped from Lynch’s creations before—“The Hills” on Beauty Behind the Madness features Laura Palmer’s iconic bone-shattering, blood-curdling scream in the Black Lodge. The wind tunnel reference is not as obvious, especially since The Weeknd scrapped the cover of “In Heaven” rumored to be included on the album. Yet, the whooshing is enough to remind Lynch obsessives of Eraserhead’s conclusion when the Lady in the Radiator embraces Jack Nance’s Henry in a blinding white light. There, like on Hurry Up Tomorrow, it feels like salvation.