In February, the Weeknd slipped into the 2025 Grammy Awards without anyone noticing. He’d been working alongside the Recording Academy for four months to plan his grand return to the ceremony. It had to be kept a secret for dramatic effect and theatrics of that nature. The singer had fallen out with the awards body in 2020 after his album After Hours — and its monumentally colossal single “Blinding Lights” — received zero nominations. He vowed to boycott the show and bar his label from submitting any future releases for consideration, including what might actually be his career triumph, Dawn FM.
Backstage at Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena, the Weeknd prepared to storm the stage with over 100 dancers and an assist from Playboi Carti. Meanwhile, the audience watched as Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. delivered a speech in front of a wall of headlines. Each story on the screen was about the shutout, his boycott, and his claim that the prestigious institution was corrupt. The Weeknd wasn’t the first artist to step away, with Frank Ocean and Drake among the others. But he was one of the first to come back.
The Weeknd delivered a blazing performance of “Cry for Me” and “Timeless,” two standouts from his sixth studio album Hurry Up Tomorrow, released two days prior. Still, it wasn’t enough to garner any nominations for the 2026 Grammy Awards.
The newly-revealed nods for next year’s show found Hurry Up Tomorrow shut out across the board, including the pop and R&B categories he’s previously earned nominations in. While it wasn’t his most defining release (again, Dawn FM, I’m so sorry it had to be this way), the album was far from unsuccessful. In July, “Timeless,” the Carti collab, became the Weeknd’s 28th song to surpass one billion streams on Spotify. The album also boasted popular collaborations with Anita on the Brazilian funk record “São Paulo” and Lana Del Rey on “The Abyss,” a hazy callback to his early soundscape.
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The Weeknd didn’t run an aggressive Grammys campaign, but Republic Records did push For Your Consideration ads for Hurry Up Tomorrow. The label pulled quotes from Pitchfork, which called it, “The Weeknd’s most expansive-sounding album.” The Guardian, the poster highlighted, called it, “a record that will floor you,” though it did remove the other half of that clause which read, “and drive you up the wall.” Though not included in the FYC round-up, Rolling Stone described the album as “dazzling and frustrating, with moments of lyrical clarity and sonic density that stand out amidst the heavy-hearted reflections and even heavier synths.”
The sonic elements of Hurry Up Tomorrow are the one thing about the album the Recording Academy didn’t seem to totally mind, actually. Cirkuit, who is up for Producer of the Year, Non-Classical, is being recognized for his work on the album tracks “Red Terror” and “Big Sleep,” which features Italian composer Giorgio Moroder. The nod is also thanks, likely in a significantly larger part, to the producer’s work on Lady Gaga’s Mayhem.
The rest was, apparently, less interesting. The Weeknd grapples with his own legacy across Hurry Up Tomorrow, from the towering heights of his career to all the times he feels he came up short. He previously suggested that the record will be his last under the moniker. “Everything needs to feel like a challenge. And for me right now, the Weeknd, whatever that is, it’s been mastered,” he told Variety earlier this year. “No one’s gonna do the Weeknd better than me, and I’m not gonna do it better than what it is right now. I think I’ve overcome every challenge as this persona.”
Maybe the Recording Academy will like Abel Tesfaye more.
“Abel boycotting the show — the Weeknd boycotting the show — was a really significant moment where it was like, there is a massive artist who is saying, not only does he not want to be on the show, but he’s not even going to submit his music,” Grammy Awards Executive Producer Ben Winston told Rolling Stone the morning after this year’s ceremony. “Like that is as damning as you like. And Harvey hasn’t gone and sought the Weeknd’s love. Harvey has just gone and done the job and done the work.”
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When Winston struck up conversations with the Weeknd and his team, he was curious about how his feelings towards the Academy had changed. “I think they’ll have to say how they feel. I never want to speak for them,” Winston said. “But I think the proof is in the pudding, in that, like, there he was.” In an interview with The New York Times, the Weeknd said, “I’ve got no beef, it was so long ago, and they did a lot of changes, I mean, we got under the hood.”
And yet, some things never change and playing the game doesn’t always work. No hard feelings, though, right?
