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15:38 · 2,238 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The album is read as the next step in a single ongoing character, built across the mixtape trilogy, Kiss Land, Beauty Behind the Madness and Starboy, each repeating the same cycle with different production.
▶ 00:00:21
- The name itself carries the thesis, the weekend as pleasure and nightlife on one side and weakened as the cost of it on the other.
▶ 00:01:07
- The record opens with another relationship over and the character heading to Las Vegas specifically to avoid dealing with it.
▶ 00:01:43
- After a near-overdose the following songs work as flashback, explaining how he ended up there, which is why the sequence does not run chronologically.
▶ 00:02:26
- The clearest self-indictment is that he knew the relationship was over and held on anyway, which he describes as protecting her while actually poisoning her idea of what she deserved.
▶ 00:03:33
- Snowchild is the turn, where he looks back at how far he has come, from planning a move to California in 2011 to missing Toronto by 2015, and shows some gratitude for what he lost.
▶ 00:04:17
- His stated reason for leaving Los Angeles is that the city was wearing down both of them, with the attention and temptation that came with the money.
▶ 00:05:19
- The album asks its own best question: whether the city was ever the cause, or whether it was always him.
▶ 00:06:29
- The deepest line in the record lands on the idea that he cannot love anyone properly because he has not learned to respect himself, which reframes the heartlessness as a defence rather than a trait.
▶ 00:08:15
- The tragedy the video identifies is that the old coping methods stop working. He found something that mattered and recognised it too late, and the ending leaves him exactly where the record started.
▶ 00:12:14