Listen, I love celebrities, but there's nothing more frustrating to me than how they dribble out information in tiny, infuriating doses that don't get close to telling me everything I want to know. Like, I'm glad to hear that he's picked out a title and all, but when does The Weeknd's new album come out? The 26-year-old artist, real name Abęl Makkonen Tesfaye, released the title and album art on Sep. 21 for his upcoming third studio album STARBOY, but withheld the release date. Which leaves me with nothing to do but speculate, because I have my own life to live. I can’t just be waiting around on Twitter until he’s in the mood to grace me with a little more info. Based on past album announcements and release dates, I'm putting my money on a January 2017 drop for STARBOY, and I'll tell you why.
As I mentioned, this will be The Weeknd's third studio album, and, just as an overview, he seems to like to put out new material every two years. He had a flurry of mixtapes in 2011 — House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence — followed by his debut album, Kiss Land, in 2013, and his sophomore follow-up Beauty Behind the Madness in 2015. I'm no math major, but, right off the bat, I'm gonna guess we'll see STARBOY in 2017 just to follow that very pleasing pattern. (The only deviation is his compilation album Trilogy, which came out in 2012, but there were only three new tracks on that album. Everybody breaks their own rules sometimes, so I'm going to ignore that outlier for now.)
But now let's get a little more specific, because I bet you're curious how I landed on January, specifically. Looking at his albums, The Weeknd announced Kiss Land in March 2013, and it dropped in September of the same year, for a difference of six months. Two years later, however, when it came time to start promotion for Beauty Behind the Madness, things moved a little more quickly; the album was announced in July 2015, and released just one month later, in August 2015.
So, if we're looking at the average for those two, we come up with about three-and-a-half months. And, if you start the timer with the album announcement, a little less than four months in the future puts us right at the beginning of 2017, in early January. So that's my best guess as far as when we could be bouncing to new Weeknd tracks. Please forward all winnings and prizes to me care of my home and my smug smug self.
