All he wants to do is go on tour and drop albums

fake retirement era over

what playing jrpgs for 8 months straight does to a mfer

another jumbled album full of basic metro doomin trap loops and omnisphere presets plus the same mike dean moog lead presets

owari da jrpgs killed the re-invention 💔

new abel interview with gene park:

YOOOOOOOO

The Weeknd is busy gaming — and he wants everyone to play this indie gem

The only convenience store in a foggy, coastal town is manned by a clerk whose smile is frozen. I sell him some fish, and that’s about as deep as it goes. It’s the most normal interaction in this town, because conversations with anyone else drift into strange non sequiturs. No one is talking about the dead woman I fished out of a river.

I’m playing a demo of an enigmatic video game called “About Fishing.” The circumstances of how I discovered it are even more strange. Abel Tesfaye, the global pop star from Canada known as the Weeknd, told me I needed to play it.

I’d been hoping to interview Tesfaye because for the past few years, he has embarked on a video game pilgrimage. Between marathon sessions of games like “Elden Ring” and the Persona series, he fills his alternate Instagram account, gene.hackerman, with whatever game captures his attention, before suddenly showing up and sharing sake in Japan with its creators. He’s even accessing games yet to be released, like an early cut of the “Persona 4” remake.

Like any fan of him and the games he plays, I wanted to know what he was doing. I sent a direct message to gene.hackerman in June.

Weeks later, somewhere along his Europe tour, he wrote back.
“I want to talk more games eventually,” he said. Just not yet. First, he wanted me to try a game called “About Fishing.” I’d never heard of it.

“The atmosphere got me immediately,” Tesfaye said. “When I was young, my cousin had this collection of burned Sega Dreamcast discs, including Japanese releases I had never seen before.”

Those games included “Shenmue,” a groundbreaking adventure game about a small coastal town; “Seaman,” a game where you raise a grumpy man-faced fish voiced by Leonard Nimoy; and “Power Stone,” a quirky multiplayer action game.
“‘About Fishing’ gave me that feeling again,” Tesfaye said. He was so moved by it, he invited the developer to his Miami office to hang out and talk about the game.

This is how Tesfaye met 27-year-old Kevin Brown, who lives a few hours away in Florida and makes games with a few collaborators under the name Water Museum.

Until about two years ago, Brown worked in corporate animation. The company downsized, and Brown believes it’s because one of its largest clients opted for AI-generated videos. Instead of looking for work, he taught himself programming to make video games.

His first release, “Arctic Eggs,” asks players to flip eggs in a frying pan inside a dystopian city. “About Fishing” asks them to stock fish and solve a mystery. I tell Brown these are some weird ideas: simple and compelling but odd. He laughed and said he sees his commitment to experimental game design as digging himself into and out of holes.

“You’ll see online all these game design books and videos on how to make a game good,” he said, “but the problem is I’ve already dug myself into this hole.”

Brown’s work evokes an era of imported hits and Lynchian storytelling in games. (While Tesfaye and I each brought up David Lynch, Brown hadn’t seen his work; after studying up he saw the connection.) For many players who grew up in the turn of the century, the dreamlike narratives of Japanese games felt unlike anything coming out of the West.

“It reminded me of being a kid and finding games that felt like they came from somewhere else,” Tesfaye said.

I passed along the above quote to Brown, who was delighted to hear his goal was understood. He loves the era for its tones and use of language.

“A lot of older games, they were roughly translated and sometimes the words strung together are weirdly beautiful,” he said, adding that their patterns and beats sound like poetry.

Brown’s games have deliberately low polygon counts to create early-2000s-style 3D models. He wraps them in realistic, photographic textures that make his characters feel artificial and human at the same time. That clerk with the frozen smile is eerie because he looks like a real person, just with jagged edges of the polygons that form his body.

“I wanted it to feel like it’s from somewhere else,” Brown said.
The game starts with a girl protagonist fishing by the beach. Brown’s game focuses on the physicality of actions, asking players to cast and reel a line and wrestle fish by thrusting or swinging the mouse.

The goal, at least as far as we know in the short demo, is to unearth strange objects to solve a murder mystery. Upgrading your rod and equipment makes it easier to navigate and pull eerie artifacts out from their watery graves. As you find new fishing spots, you run into other strange characters with cryptic messages as you explore a lonely, moody town backed by a melancholy soundtrack.

Tesfaye invited Brown and composer Cameron Ginex to his office to show more of “About Fishing.” To dress for the occasion, Tesfaye said he wore a cap styled like a vintage fishing shop souvenir, except it featured the fish Pokémon Magikarp.

The meeting lasted for about five hours, playing the game together and talking. Brown’s games are mainly controlled with the mouse and keyboard, and Tesfaye requested more robust support for controllers.

“I’m definitely a controller guy,” he said.
Brown remembers expensive bottled water and classic video game magazines scattered across the conference table — and his own sweating. He nervously clicked through dialogue that Tesfaye hadn’t read. Tesfaye asked him to slow down.

Mostly, he remembers how Tesfaye said he wants to give back to a medium he loves. Instead of talking about music, Tesfaye spent hours discussing games and anime.

“After that, we’ve kept in touch. We’ve got a group chat, and anytime I get a text and it has his name on my screen, I perk up,” Brown said. “It’s cool to see that the moment meant a lot to him. The game meant a lot to him too.”

Brown’s voice was overcome with emotion. “Sorry, I haven’t processed it all yet either.”

Tesfaye’s loud love of games is deepening his connection with fans all over. When 22-year-old Chiara Giagnorio in Germany saw Tesfaye posting screenshots of “Persona 5” this year, she couldn’t believe the timing. She was also playing the game. She was shocked when Tesfaye beat the game before she did.

“I’m still not done. I’m currently in Futaba’s arc, and I’m like, oh my God, he’s fast,” she said in an interview. “He’s touring at the same time. How does he do that?”

Tesfaye has posted jokes about his own adoration of Dr. Tae Takemi, a datable character in the game. In a memorable moment at a July show in Frankfurt on his record-setting tour, Giagnorio stood at the barricades, held out a plush doll she had made of Takemi, and screamed when he grabbed it and waved it to the audience.

“I was shaking, screaming. He smiled so brightly,” she said. “... Knowing my favorite artist enjoys the same stuff as you and wouldn’t judge you for your interests, it just makes me feel so connected.”

Tesfaye has been incorporating video game culture into his performances, and he seems to dig deep into catalogues. In Brazil, he played a song backed by a video directed by Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike. The aesthetic closely resembles the work of video game creator Suda 51, whom Tesfaye spent time with in May.

He said Brown’s work so far has “stayed” with him.
“The work looks simple at first, but there is a lot underneath it. He can make something feel terrifying, and then, in the same beat, make you laugh. That is someone in control of their craft,” he says of Brown.

Brown is busy at work to finish “About Fishing,” which he said he hopes to release this year — “before ‘Grand Theft Auto 6,’” he says with a chuckle.

Tesfaye said he believes in Water Museum and hopes to turn more people, like me, on to “About Fishing.”
“It’s beautiful and haunting in the right ways,” he said. “I just want this team to win.”

washingtonpost.com/entertainment/video-games/2026/08/09/weeknd-is-busy-gaming-he-wants-everyone-play-about-fishing

This makes me so happy to hear

Abel and Gene Park is the collab I never expected. As someone who follows the gaming industry and gaming journalism extensively, this is so f***ing dope.

This description is hilarious

Now that the retirement was a double confirmed marketing gimmick we can put this album in the bottom 3 of his catalogue

No thats okay

if HUT was not the end of the character, then i deadass rank it the weakest in the trilogy and worse than starboy

Here yall go

I think there's this initial feeling that you'll be too old for this once you get to a certain age that every artist feels. Every artist says they wanna retire at X age until they actually get there and realize they still love it

metro not to blame for that album

but need to hear him with london on da track for a run tbh

let’s get some R&B s*** back please

How does the outcome of the album change the quality of the album?

hut was great i dont get the hate

hut is great when I listen to it but I always forget it exists
AF and DFM still get played all the time

london on da track

you're not serious

man nocturnal is generational

?

What does what happens after an album have to do with the music on the actual album?

Is The Black Album by Jay no longer a classic since it wasn't his retirement album?

thematic approach to making the record + outside factors, personal ones included affect the way the album should be a***yzed. if you're making a record strictly about a personal setback (losing your voice) and largely about shedding skin and retiring a character, you can't expect for people to weigh the album the same way lol. the record reads completely pointless at this point, especially after dawn fm.