As with any output by the Weeknd, the Canadian alt-R&B star’s forthcoming record looks set to be a whole aesthetic. The first three singles from the album, titled Hurry Up Tomorrow, already hint at his continued genre-hopping, while the release is being accompanied by an entire film. Now, the man born Abel Tesfaye has unveiled even more: a special collector’s edition of the record that wears a Jean-Michel Basquiat on its sleeve.

And it’s not just any Basquiat, but an early image created when the artist was a teenager. It depicts a crowd of anonymous figures, collectively referred to as “Working Class Heroes,” gathered in front of a rudimentary cityscape, with some edifices tagged with “unfinished building.” Above them floats another figure, their hand grasping a balloon, high above the scene; “Ho-Hum,” reads a thought balloon. The entire piece is hand-titled “Upon Leaving the ‘Norm.'”

The drawing was sourced from one of Basquiat’s sketchbooks, created when the artist was 17 years old. It was rarely seen until licensing company Artestar hooked Tesfaye up. Unveiling the cover on Instagram, the musician noted the “privilege” of presenting the project.

The Weeknd in Hollywood, California, 2022. Photo: Shutterstock.

Visually, the work offers a subtle reference to the Weeknd’s House of Balloons (2011), his debut mixtape, which aptly had balloons on its cover, and which shot him into mainstream consciousness. More broadly, it echoes Tesfaye’s admiration for Basquiat—let’s not forget, after all, that this is a man who modeled his hair after the artist’s distinct locks.

“I want to be remembered as iconic and different,” he told Rolling Stone about his hair in 2015. “So I was like, ‘Fuck it—I’m gonna let my hair just be what it wants.’ I’ll probably cut it if it starts interfering with my sight.”

The Weeknd’s limited-edition release of Hurry Up Tomorrow will see the Basquiat work printed on vinyl and CD covers, as well as assorted merchandise. It follows the record’s other special edition drops featuring designs by Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and comic art legend Frank Miller.

The Weeknd, Hurry Up Tomorrow (2024) special collector’s edition. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York.

This is, of course, far from Basquiat’s first appearance on a record sleeve. Most famously, in 1983, the artist created the cover art for “Beat Bop,” a track by Rammellzee and K-Rob with, reportedly, musical contributions from Basquiat himself. Only 500 copies of the original pressing were produced, with one sealed copy selling for $126,000 at Sotheby’s in 2020.

In 1984, Basquiat designed the cover for San Francisco punk band The Offs’s First Record (it was also their only record). He was paid $500 for his effort, which bears his abstract, minimalist hand. Decades on, the artist’s Bird on Money (1981), his vividly textured homage to Charlie Parker currently held in the Rubell Museum in Florida, was used on the cover of the Strokes’s 2020 album, The New Abnormal.

Jean-Michel Basquiat. Photo: Rose Hartman/Getty Images.

While beloved in his lifetime, Basquiat has posthumously emerged as a major museum and art market darling, when not being embraced by celebrities including Swizz Beatz and Jay-Z. Even the artist’s sketches and notebooks have been upturned for ever more traces of his singular visual style. His 1980s notebooks were published in 2015; eight of them went on view at “Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks” at the Brooklyn Museum that same year.

“Just one word on one page,” Dieter Buchhart, who co-curated “The Unknown Notebooks,” told Wallpaper, “would be as important to [Basquiat] as a large-scale painting or drawing.”