The Weeknd & Lana Del Rey give their most stirring duet yet on “The Abyss”

Abel Tesfaye said Hurry Up Tomorrow would be his last album as The Weeknd before he released it, and it sure sounds like it is. It’s a cinematic, 84-minute concept album that finds The Weeknd wrestling with the highs and lows of fame and reckoning with death over the most interesting production of any of his albums, putting a hellish bow on The Weeknd’s career. It’s a rush of new wave, industrial, noise, soul samples, and more that takes a turn towards Hurry Up Tomorrow‘s fateful end on the album’s pivotal, fourth-to-last track “The Abyss,” and that track also happens to have one of the most stirring duets in Weeknd history.

Like a lot of A-list stars have been doing lately, he released the album without any public credits, so I’m sure I wasn’t the only one taken aback when I heard Lana Del Rey come in on “The Abyss.” The Weeknd and Lana both came up around the same time in similar ways. Back in the early 2010s, when it was a little easier for artists to maintain a sense of mystique and when the music blogosphere regularly propelled new tracks into omnipresence, The Weeknd and Lana Del Rey both emerged as mysterious artists with breakthrough tracks that were unstoppable. We collectively eventually learned they were monikers created by Abel Tesfaye and Elizabeth Grant, respectively, but even before we knew anything about them, the music spoke for itself.

The Weeknd had a few tracks out by early 2011; one sampled Beach House, people knew he was somehow associated with Drake producer Noah “40” Shebib, and the music was this haunting, nocturnal mix of R&B, indie, and post-dubstep that got coined “alt-R&B” and helped launch an entire paradigm shift within the genre. A few years later, stars as big as Beyoncé and Rihanna would embrace the vibe shift that he helped pioneer, and The Weeknd himself would go on to collaborate with both of them. Lana, meanwhile, appeared as a caricature of the American Dream and went viral with “Video Games,” a simply undeniable song that gave the millennial generation a version of Nancy Sinatra-inspired baroque pop that they could call their own. Both artists quickly skyrocketed from blog-level virality to actual stardom, and that came with some growing pains for both of them. Lana bombed on SNL with a performance that threatened to tank her career for good, and The Weeknd released an “official debut album” (2013’s Kiss Land) that suggested maybe all he had left in him after his game-changing mixtape trilogy was a watered-down version of the same thing.

But here we are in 2025, The Weeknd and Lana are two of the biggest stars in the world with vast, widely-loved catalogs, so it goes without saying that they cleared their hurdles. They also realized that they make quite the dynamic duo across multiple collaborations: 2015’s “Prisoner,” 2016’s “Stargirl Interlude,” and 2017’s especially enduring “Lust For Life.” And now, nearly eight years after releasing that last one, they’ve released their most jaw-dropping duet yet.

“I’ll see you on the other side,” The Weeknd sings, as “The Abyss” signals the start of the album’s long goodbye, and then the beat drops out, and–true to the song’s title–it plummets into a sonic abyss. The Weeknd sounds like he’s literally drowning in a sea of synths as he cries out “Oh mama, I’ll pray,” and then Lana’s voice suddenly swirls around him and asks, “Is a threat not a promise?” It’s genuinely one of the most chilling moments that either of them have ever laid to tape.

Read our full album review of Hurry Up Tomorrow here and see The Weeknd’s just-announced tour dates.