Update: “Lost In The Fire” now has an official video, which you can watch below. The video features both artists mugging the camera in a blackened room, with Gesaffelstein in costume as what looks like a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The Weeknd has an afro pick jammed in his hair too, which looks mighty cool. Check it out.
You would think that seeing The Weeknd link up with French electronic producer/DJ Gesaffelstein would result in an upbeat, groovy dance track with a healthy glaze of Abel’s icy, melancholy nostalgia on their new track, “Lost In The Fire.” It does, but it also holds some unexpected surprises in the form of what appears to be a barely concealed shot at former collaborator and fellow Canadian Drake. Check it out below.
After delivering a couple of his signature, devil-may-care come-ons, The Weeknd finishes off the first verse of the track with a line that many have already interpreted is a thinly veiled reference to Drake, singing, “I just want a baby with the right one / ‘Cause I could never be the one to hide one.” The connection is easy to make with Pusha T’s sneering taunt last summer that Drake was “hiding a child” in his scathing diss track, “The Story Of Adidon.” There’s also reason to believe that Drake and The Weeknd may have enough bad blood to spur such a jab once you look back in their respective histories.
Drake and The Weeknd notoriously had a falling out shortly after the release of Drake’s sophomore album Take Care, which The Weeknd contributed to extensively. When Abel refused to sign with Drake’s OVO Sound label, instead striking out on his own, Drake snidely snubbed the singer on his 2013 track “5AM In Toronto” with the lyric, “A couple albums dropped, those are still on the shelf / I bet them sh*ts would have popped if I was willin’ to help.” Many believed at the time that Drake was referring to Trilogy, The Weeknd’s major label reissue of his first three independently-released mixtapes. The collection supposedly underperformed, leading some to speculate that the singer was a flash in the pan who wouldn’t sell without Drake’s co-sign, which helped expose him to his mainstream audience in the first place with a placement on Drake’s then-popular October’s Very Own blog.
However, The Weeknd would eventually find his footing on 2015’s The Beauty Behind The Madness and with the success of its 2016 follow-up Starboy, would make The Weeknd a bonafide star in his own right. It seems he never quite forgave Drake’s snark if he’s choosing to rekindle their feud now.
“Lost In The Fire” will appear on Gesaffelstein’s upcoming album, Hyperion. Meanwhile, The Weeknd is currently working on a follow-up to Starboy, Chapter 6, which is supposedly “coming soon.”
