On Tour

The Weeknd and His Mustache Announce New Album

The Weeknd and his new mustache announced Thursday that their new album is titled After Hours. And let he who has not had a bad bout of facial hair cast the first stone.

Admittedly, my entire life is a monument to weird facial-hair choices, but nonetheless one has to admit the Weeknd‘s new mustache is distracting. In a vacuum, the choice makes sense. Abel is channeling the aesthetics of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — a Hunter S. Thompson novel first featured in Rolling Stone and then adapted into a college-bro 1998 film classic. So, in that way, his mustache is almost like the Benicio del Toro to the Weeknd’s Johnny Depp.

In the teaser video, the Weeknd drives a car on a nightmarishly long highway as a CGI city skyline is revealed. Slowly, the title After Hours is spelled out in red and blue letters, while a storm rages in the background. It’s sinister, foreboding, and dramatic in peak the Weeknd fashion and continues his one man (one ‘stache) journey to become the Hunter S. Thompson of .

Last year, the Toronto singer released two lead singles from the album, “Blinding Lights” and “Heartless.” Predictably, the latter claimed the Number One spot on the Rolling Stone Top 100 Songs chart after battling Mariah Carey’s Christmas classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

Unfortunately, there’s no release date confirmed for Abel Tesfaye’s full-length follow-up to 2016’s Starboy. So, while you wait, feel free to watch him with a far less pronounced mustache in the Oscar-snubbed-but-commercially-successful film Uncut Gems.