Less than a week after debuting his first new track since 2018’s My Dear Melancholy, Abel Tesfaye — better known as The Weeknd — is back with the dazzling, disorienting video for “Heartless.” After TMZ reported that the Torontonian was seen in Vegas shooting the video, which some fans took as an encouraging sign about the impending release of his long-awaited “Chapter 6,” sure enough, there he is, taking in the desert city’s constantly coruscating constellations of blinding lights with producer Metro Boomin.
Since the shoot shut down the strip for a pretty significant part of one evening several weeks ago, in the video, Abel and Metro cruise the streets in a convertible unencumbered and spend some time in the Caesar’s Palace casino, where Abel makes out with one of the faux-Greek statues and trips out from a salacious lick of a live toad — a gimmick originally used in an episode of Family Guy. The Weeknd does a pretty good impression of a totally inebriated person as the imagery becomes more and more twisted and surreal, sending him dashing down the Strip in search of an escape from his own self-destructive ways.
In August, The Weeknd said that he’s in “full album mode,” lending more support to the theory that his new project is dropping soon, along with the release of another new single, appropriately titled “Blinding Lights.”
