The music video for “Heartless,” the lead single from The Weeknd’s new album, After Hours, opens with Abel Tesfaye standing in the port-cochère of a Las Vegas casino. He turns his gaze upward and grins ear-to-ear as overhead lights dance on his sunglasses. The “In Your Eyes” video, his most recent, closes with actress Zaina Miuccia holding Tesfaye’s decapitated head—still wearing those shades—aloft against a dramatic sunset.

Everything that unfolds in between, across four total videos, feels obsessively premeditated. Compared to the way some recent A-ticket albums have spilled out in careless bursts, or the way certain pop stars become entirely different characters for each new video, The Weeknd’s approach is radically holistic. One video begins where the last ended. A narrative arc emerges, artfully portraying a downward spiral. Tesfaye’s outfit—black pants, shirt, and tie paired with a red suit jacket—never changes. He’s not here to try on a bunch of looks; he came in the store knowing exactly what he wanted.

Over email, Tesfaye explains how much of this was influenced by existing touchstones: eclectic films from cult favorites like Andrzej Żuławski’s Posession to more obvious fare like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; from the incredibly specific (like nods to erotic horror flick Trouble Every Day in “Blinding Lights”) to more broad inspirations (“almost every thriller film you can think of in the ‘70s and ‘80s for ‘In Your Eyes,’” says Tesfaye). Despite the varying source material, the synthesis is so deft that the stitches are barely visible.

After Hours’ carefully manicured aesthetic extends well beyond its music videos. On the album cover, Tesfaye wears the same outfit and sports the same nose injury he sustains somewhere in between the “Heartless” and “Blinding Lights” videos. In recent late night show appearances, the costume’s on and there’s even some meta interplay with the videos—Tesfaye sported the After Hours outfit during an unorthodox performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and the “After Hours” short film opens with Tesfaye onstage at Jimmy Kimmel Live!, having just finished performing “Blinding Lights,” which had actually happened a few weeks prior.

“I wrote the ‘After Hours’ short and ‘In Your Eyes’ after I found out I was scheduled to perform on Jimmy Kimmel,” says Tesfaye. “[I] thought it would be fun to confuse the narrative a bit with the reality of my album promo run alongside the story we were creating in my visuals,” he adds, citing reality-bending screenwriter Charlie Kaufman as an inspiration. “My creative director, La Mar [Taylor] introduced me to director Alex Lill, who’s been doing cool indie music videos. The way he played with set design was really fantastic. After Alex directed the Colbert performance I knew I wanted to use him for everything."

Fans have known Tesfaye to be a deft curator ever since he cultivated a shadowy air of mystery when debuting the first Weeknd music almost a decade ago, but After Hours is, both musically and visually, his most intentional project yet. To hone in on a nocturnal, ‘80s-influenced sound, he called upon a production team that’s Ocean’s Eleven-level eclectic in its division of specializations: day-one collaborator Illangelo, pop super-producer Max Martin, Atlanta trap maestro Metro Boomin, and electronic wizard Oneohtrix Point Never, to name a few.

Sifting a singular vibe out of that potpourri is nothing short of alchemy, but for After Hours’ music videos to follow suit, Tesfaye would require one unifying voice. Anton Tammi directed all four, and even shot the album cover. A film school dropout and former journalist from Helsinki, Finland, Tammi began making some truly astonishing music videos in his mid-20s. In early highlights like Bruce Smear’s glitchy, abstract “Pick And Roll” and the gauzy, arthouse-core of JIL’s “All Your Words,” his knack for sensuous lighting and disorienting camera tricks—both readily apparent in his After Hours work—are on clear display. But despite Tammi’s masterful eye, it’s surprising to see someone who’s not yet a household name being given the reins to a four-video suite for a pop star who’s currently reigning both Billboard’s top albums and singles charts.

"I’ve had my eye on Anton’s work for some time,” says Tesfaye. “We hired him during the Starboy tour to do some visual content for the screens and ever since then I was always curious to see what he can do with a complete project. When I was writing the concept of a ‘character’ losing his mind in Vegas… I kept thinking about his style and how I felt he would be the right person to execute the vision.”

Soon enough, that character took on a life beyond that first video, and Tammi was there every step of the way. "After we did ‘Heartless’ I started falling in love with ‘The Character,’” writes Tesfaye. “I wanted to see him on screen more and I could see that Anton wanted to shoot more of me playing him. We had so much footage left from ‘Heartless’ that it was heartbreaking to cut some of it out. So I quickly wrote a continuation: ‘What happens after he throws up?’ Anton fell in love with the story and we were on our way.”

To help unpack The Weeknd’s After Hours aesthetic, GQ got in touch with Tammi over Skype while he’s quarantined in Sweden.

GQ: How did you initially get into making music videos?

Anton Tammi: It's, in a way, because of journalism. When I was 20, I quit university and started to do other things—first writing for different magazines, and then for radio and TV, which led to me starting to do filmmaking.

I was always a big film buff and found myself relating to musicians who made really cinematic music. We just started to do our own thing in Finland, me and a few of my friends. It was a hobby for such a long time—I almost feel like it's still a hobby. It still feels like this weird idea I got with a few of my friends, that we could do art rather than business or something else. I moved to the States in 2014 because my brother was living there, and I did a few videos there for local artists, Bruce Smear and JIL to name a few. Eventually, La Mar [Taylor, The Weeknd’s longtime creative director] and Abel saw the work that I did. But I really think I come from a quite typical background of indie Internet filmmaking.

So they just came to you out of the blue, having seen some of your work?

Not exactly. I knew them from an earlier shoot. In 2016, they were planning [the Starboy: Legends of the Fall] tour, and they asked me to do visuals for it. Me and La Mar know each other through that.

Some time passed, and while I was in L.A. during the 2019 Grammys, I saw La Mar at a party. We started talking, he said he had seen the work I had been doing, [specifically] a video for Lykke Li, and saw that I was developing. He said they were making the new Weeknd album and they were looking at my work, and they could see me directing a video for the new album.

A few months later, they flew me to L.A. I heard the song "After Hours"—I'm just mind-blown that they're playing this stuff for me. From the first meeting, Abel and I were really vibing, talking about certain references that we both liked, learning we have the same taste. In October, I flew back to L.A. again, they played me a few other songs—"Blinding Lights" and "Heartless"—and Abel said he wanted to shoot in Las Vegas for the latter. I wrote a treatment for them and suddenly, things just happened really quickly. Now that I explain it, I realize how it was this very long process that took over a year. We really talked and exchanged ideas month after month, finally finding something that felt right. It was this weird thing based on coincidence.

Was there a plan from the beginning to have a set storyline, or look, or director for all four of the After Hours videos?

All of this was very intuitive. It's like jamming for a musician—you meet, you talk, you develop ideas. Time passes, you meet again, and if it feels right, you end up directing the video. If the shoot goes well, you can do another one.

It would be kind of wrong if Abel was like, “Yeah, I want to hire one single director to direct every single video for my album.” He's doing something so big and so of-the-moment that it has to live. When you are doing videos for this big of an artist, and you’re doing them at the same time they’re still working on the songs, everything should be open. You have to make quick, intuitive decisions based on visual ideas as the album changes every day. I came in while they were still working on the album, I heard multiple songs and talked with Abel about what kind of video ideas he saw for them. It was a big, long discussion with him. I was mainly the listener.

There might be more videos to come, and the story's going to continue with other directors. I think that's so cool. I was blessed to do the first four videos. It's like any art form—you do something, and you continue until you feel you're done. I feel like me and Abel intuitively created this saga of four films that ended up with him dying in the last scene of the last video. After that, I feel like I don't necessarily have anything to give to him anymore, as we did such a big story already. His album and visuals will continue as he keeps developing the big concept of After Hours—after all it's his story, not mine.

The connective tissue between the videos—did that come about as you went along, or did you know the plot from the beginning?

It wasn't like, “Let's start the first video in Las Vegas, and then end up with Abel’s head cut off at the end of the fourth.” As Abel mentioned, we talked about a bunch of films, and I think everything was the end result of that big conversation. I think that’s the ideal way of doing a music video. From our conversations, some things stayed, and we had a lot of ideas, shot even more ideas. And then the story starts to build from there.

I think it was clear that the first video should look like a psychedelic Las Vegas film; the second video should be a car-driving video, where he's taking himself from Las Vegas to L.A.; and the third video should be him after this live show, going downward. The fourth video should be a horror story. So there was this big theme for each video, and there's an even bigger theme for the full album that’s obviously in Abel's mind.

Things were free and open in a very creative and beautiful way. We wanted to do a phone booth scene in the first video, but then we ended up doing that for the last video. All four videos, they're flirting with each other, winking at each other. Sometimes it was even based on improvisation. For instance, in "Blinding Lights," we had this long take where Abel’s walking down this old Vegas road, in character and doing his thing. We just followed him and suddenly, there's a bird on the ground. He scares it, it flies away, and suddenly it makes his character so real. In a way, it's nothing—he just scared a bird—but I was laughing out loud on set when he did it. It was a genius bit of improvisation from him. The character is carefully thought-through, but some of the actions are not planned. That's a good symbol for how everything happened.

How did he describe that character to you?

He didn't describe it that much, and I didn't feel the need to ask. Because of our conversations before the shoot I already felt I knew what kind of character we were going to have. Also I've known [his music] so well for so long—I remember listening to his first SoundCloud things when I was growing up in Finland—I felt like I never needed to ask.

It's like a mystery we're creating together. He plays me the song, and it already has such a strong DNA— it's very intuitive. Abel is a mysterious person and I respect that. What we do is open for interpretation. It's not like, “Why was his head cut off?” There's not necessarily that discussion between me and him. It's art and it's poetry, and I think it's beautiful to create that mystery together.

It's interesting though, that the mystery also exists between the two of you, and not just between you both and the audience.

Me and Abel, we are similar in some ways: he's an artist from Toronto, I'm a filmmaker from Helsinki. In a way, how could these two puzzle pieces work together? It's two people from different sides of the world, but we're almost the same age and we grew up with the same music and film. We love directors like Nicolas Winding Refn, Francis Ford Coppola, Gaspar Noé, Scorsese, De Palma. Very quickly, I understood that everything I like, he likes. Everything that he likes, I like. Me and him, we just had this silent agreement of what's aesthetically good.

What did you think of Uncut Gems?

I saw it in theaters the day after we finished "Blinding Lights." I think it's amazing, and the Safdie brothers… I like Heaven Knows What a lot. I think that's their best film, because it's so real. They're a little older than me, but I think they have similar references and I relate to them. I'm just so happy that directors and films like this exist. But I don't think the existence of Uncut Gems affected much of our stuff, because "Blinding Lights" and "Heartless" were already shot before it came out.

Yeah, other than Abel’s appearance in Uncut Gems, the only major connection I see between it and After Hours is Oneohtrix Point Never's involvement.

I met him a few times when I went to Abel's studio and they were still making the music. It was a really memorable moment: they played the album before it was released while we were talking about the last two videos. Dan [Lopatin, a.k.a. Oneohtrix] even had some ideas for us.

He's a big film buff too, a real cinephile. We were talking about the horror vibe for "In Your Eyes," and we mentioned the nightclub scene, and he asked if I knew the Tech Noir club from Terminator—there's this scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger goes to the club and shoots everybody, and you can see the name of the club in the background. And I said, “Yeah, it's such a sick name for a nightclub.” We kept talking, and as you can see in our video, the club is called After Hours, and it's the exact same font and lightbulb texture as the one from Terminator.

Or for the "After Hours" short film, Dan mentioned Diva, this French film, which I know because my dad showed it to me when I was young. A lot of it is set in French train stations, and we were going to shoot "After Hours" in a train station, so he was saying to me and Abel that we could think about that film. He had his little bit of effect on the last two videos.

I don't think most artists let their music producers have much say in the videos.

I only know Oneohtrix and Illangelo—I once directed a video for another project of his. Both of them are just good people with good taste. They've got a similar vibe to me and Abel.

What are some of the best responses you've gotten to the videos?

I'm just happy that Abel likes them. I work for him. It's not like my short films. I am his director. The best response I could get is him hiring me more than once.

When I was a small director, posting on Vimeo, it was so sick to get DMs from people telling me that they liked my work. But now because Abel is so well-known, when somebody contacts me or sends me something, I often feel like they might just want to benefit from me. I don't really focus on YouTube or Reddit comments, because if The Weeknd put out a video that's really just a black screen and a new song, there would still be tons of comments under it because he's such a big artist.

In the future, I'd love to do my own thing, like a film, and maybe even have Abel involved in it, if he is down. We can talk about that in two years.

This interview has been edited and condensed.