While he previously teased that he would be retiring, it seems the Canadian hitmaker, born Abel Tesfaye, will instead return to his earlier work. In an interview with GQ Singapore, he revealed his plans to remaster 2013’s Kiss Land.
Describing each of his previous albums as a colour, he told the publication that green currently matches what he’s working on.
“It reminds me of Kiss Land," he says. “I've been obsessing over that album recently. I'm in the process of remastering it because it's the one project I never felt I executed exactly the way I envisioned. I'm excited to go back under the hood and finally make it into what I always knew it could be.” He doesn't share any details about when the remastered album would be released.
Primarily produced by Tesfaye, Grammy-winning producer DannyBoyStyles and Canadian musician DaHeala, Kiss Land came a year after 2012’s Trilogy, a project compiling the first three mixtapes that made his name: House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence.
Building on the darker, moodier themes and tones of his previous mixtapes, The Weeknd described Kiss Land as an album about his life on tour. “I think about a terrifying place,” he told Complex in 2013. “It's a place I've never been to before that I'm very unfamiliar with. A lot of it is inspired by filmmakers like John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Ridley Scott, because they know how to capture fear.”
The film industry’s impact has carried on throughout Tesfaye’s career, including on 2025’s Hurry Up Tomorrow, which was released alongside a namesake film. That project reached No. 1 on the Billboard Canadian Albums chart and spent two weeks at the top.
Kiss Land debuted at No. 2 on the Canadian Albums chart, spending three weeks there. It’s one of his two albums that didn’t reach No. 1, along with Trilogy, which reached No. 5 after its release. Only one Kiss Land track landed on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100: “Wanderlust,” which reached No. 45 and spent 20 weeks on the chart.
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In an accompanying interview with GQ South Korea, The Weeknd further explained his comments on retiring. While he never claimed to retire from music fully, he spent a couple of years saying that he would retire his The Weeknd persona, instead going by his birth name. It seems he has had a change of heart, saying that “The Weeknd isn’t going anywhere.”
“I had a glimpse of what retirement looks like, and it isn’t for me. It’s a real privilege to do what I do. There’s nothing else like this job. The gratitude I’ve felt over the last year has been overwhelming. I’m going to keep doing this for as long as I possibly can.”
As he moves forward in his career, he intends to maintain his creative agency. “The rat race is honestly self-imposed pressure to be at the very top of my craft. And I’ve proved that to myself multiple times,” he says. “There hasn’t been a single moment in my career where I didn’t have absolute creative freedom. I designed it that way from the very beginning.
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Retiring isn’t on the cards anymore, but he confirmed what he meant when he revealed plans to disappear at the end of the final leg of his Latin American tour.
“Disappearing simply means finally taking some time to focus all my energy on one project instead of juggling multiple things. [These] past 5 years for me has been creating four concept albums, countless music videos, a TV show, a feature film, and I’m still out here on a massive world tour spanning years. I think disappearing for a little while is well earned.”
