the weeknd new album physical release date

The new Grande remix is about as artificial as Gary Guthrie’s uncanny-valley faux duet version of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” That said, these days on the charts, Abel and Ariana are hardly alone in leveraging the belated-duet gambit, and “Tears” is one of the better examples of a crass, Hot 100–driven trend. “Save Your Tears” existed for more than a year as a Weeknd solo cut.

But there’s a big difference between “Harder” and “Table” and “Save Your Tears”: those other two tracks were envisioned and recorded as duets from the jump. As recently as 2020, the two were collaborating on “ Off the Table” (No. 35), another Grande-Weeknd teamup from her latest album Positions. Back in 2014, the Weeknd scored his first-ever Top 10 hit as Grande’s guest on “ Love Me Harder,” a pulsating duet from her My Everything album that peaked at No. 7. Let me be fair to Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye and Ariana Grande, who each score their sixth No. 1 hit this week with “Save Your Tears.” Their voices sound good together, and as duet partners they have history. When this official duet went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in late ’78, Casey Kasem honored Guthrie by playing his unofficial cut-together version of “Flowers” on Kasem’s popular countdown show American Top 40. After the chopped-together duet spread to multiple radio stations, word got back to Diamond and Streisand, who went into a studio together and rerecorded “Flowers” as an actual “ nose-to-nose” duet. Guthrie tried it out on the air, and WAKY was inundated with requests for the phantom single. Given the primitive technology of the day-no computers, no ProTools-the ease with which the recordings blended was remarkable. So Guthrie created his own: He spliced together Diamond’s and Streisand’s separate recordings, which had similar arrangements and were even sung in the same key, into a single duet. But “Flowers,” a lament for a fading romance that Diamond himself co-wrote, wasn’t issued as a single, by him or by Streisand. In 1978, when Guthrie was the program director for Louisville pop station WAKY, he noticed something uncanny: Two ’70s superstars, Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand, had each recorded a version of “ You Don’t Bring Me Flowers” and issued them on their own separate LPs, six months apart.

Stories about how DJs have turned underdog records into smash hits are legion, but few hitmaking radio pros have as long a legacy as Gary Guthrie.

The weeknd new album physical release date