How Las Vegas Shapes The Weeknd’s ‘After Hours’

Like the shimmering lights towering above its famous strip, Las Vegas is an inescapable aspect of The Weeknd’s fourth album, After Hours. The desert gambling oasis plays host to several of the project’s music videos and shows up in its lyrics and plot line, reflecting the singer’s long history with the city.

Fans first got a hint that Vegas would color the album when TMZ spotted The Weeknd sprinting down Fremont Street next to the Four Queens Casino last fall, camera crew in tow. It turns out he was shooting music videos for the project’s lead singles, “Heartless” and “Blinding Lights.”

Both videos play off the city’s anything-goes spirit, as the XO singer grows increasingly inebriated amidst Vegas' glitz and glam:

The fact that they’re both set in Vegas also offers a compelling clue about the album’s plot. After Hours seems to depict the city as an escape from his life in Los Angeles, where he’s disillusioned with the star-studded lifestyle and haunted by broken love. He makes that clear from the album’s opening track, “Alone Again,” when he casts the city as a refuge:

Together we’re alone
In Vegas, I feel so at home

The first half of the album finds him continuing to express a desire to leave LA, like on “Snowchild,” when he flips the script on lyrics from 2012’s “The Morning” by singing:

Cali was the mission, but now a n*gga leaving
Leaving, leaving into the night

He seems to take action on this sentiment with “Escape From LA,” singing:

Well this place is never what it seems
Take me out LA
Take me out of LA
This place will be the end of me
Take me out LA
Take me out of LA, yeah

Both “Heartless” and “Blinding Lights,” with their Vegas-set music videos, come after “Escape From LA” sequentially, and seem to indicate that he’s fled Los Angeles for the self-indulgent comforts of Vegas. The “Heartless” video features him drinking and gambling in Caesar’s Palace. He also sings about being in the city on “Blinding Lights,” although not finding everything he hoped for:

I look around and
Sin City’s cold and empty (Oh)
No one’s around to judge me (Oh)
I can’t see clearly when you’re gone

On “Faith,” he chooses the city’s hedonism over salvation:

All my demons wanna pull me to my grave
I choose Vegas if they offer Heaven’s gate

The Weeknd has several unique personal and musical connections to Vegas that make this a compelling plot line.

His second mixtape, Thursday, featured a track titled “Heaven or Las Vegas.” That song takes its title from Cocteau Twins‘ 1990 album of the same name. He even sampled Cocteau Twins’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk” on Thursday’s “The Knowing.”

Fans may recall that he was arrested there in 2015 on charges of misdemeanor battery of a protected person after punching a police officer. He pled no contest, and escaped without jail time. Hours after the incident, he tweeted:

He also shared a now-deleted Instagram post of himself hopping on a private jet with the same caption. This seems to echo the title “Escape From LA,” albeit in reverse, proving that Vegas isn’t everything it seems to be.

Image via The Weeknd

Some fans have theorized that the album (which ends with a callback to the title track’s melody) is meant to be circular, as a commentary on The Weeknd’s inability to outrun his vices or the love that haunts him. Thus, the escape from Los Angeles to Las Vegas is really no escape at all.

He later confirmed the album’s Vegas connections in an interview with Variety, and specifically pointed to “Faith” as a reference to his arrest.

This is around 2013-14: I got arrested in Vegas, it was a real rockstar era which I wasn’t really proud of, and at the end of [the song] you hear sirens. That’s me in the back of the cop car, that moment. I always wanted to make that song but I never did, and this album felt like the perfect time, because of the setting of Las Vegas, and [the character needing] a kind of escape after a heartbreak or whatever, ‘I’m gonna go to Vegas and drown all my sorrows,’ and by the time you get to the end of the album you realize it’s more of a redemption.

He noted that the album found him revisiting that time in his life. “I wanted to go to Vegas and be this guy again, the ‘Heartless’ guy, the drug monster, the person who hates God and is losing his f*cking religion and hating what he looks like when he looks in the mirror so he keeps getting high, and hating to be sober because ‘I feel the most lonely when I’m coming down,’” he said.

Vegas' reputation as a mecca of drugs, sex, and fast money seem to fit with the subject matter The Weeknd has broached throughout his career. Coupled with his unique connections to the city, Vegas appears to be the perfect setting for After Hours.

Catch up on all the lyrics to The Weeknd’s After Hours on Genius now.

This article has been updated to include a quote from The Weeknd confirming the album’s connections to Las Vegas.