There’s something eerily intimate about hearing someone narrate their own descent in real time.
In The Weeknd’s Baptized In Fear, released on January 31, 2025, Abel Tesfaye doesn’t just revisit past pain—he reanimates it.
Set as the sixth track on Hurry Up Tomorrow, this song didn’t arrive with fanfare.
It slipped through early, accidentally uploaded to YouTube on January 30, and that unintended leak only intensified the aura around it.
The lyrics open plainly, yet they pull like undertow:
“I fell asleep in the tub, I was met with paralysis.”
It’s not metaphor masquerading as confession. It’s a scene. While the vocals begin in a lower register, Abel’s falsetto is present throughout—threaded with a haunting calm that contrasts with the urgency of his faster-paced delivery.
It feels less like theatricality and more like controlled panic, as though the track captures someone oscillating between paralysis and the instinct to survive.
The production—helmed by Tesfaye alongside OPN, Nathan Salon, and Mike Dean—echoes that stillness.
Synths are ghostly, creeping. No rhythmic swell. Just atmosphere and slow-burning dread.
Lyrically, the song folds in multiple layers. On the surface, it’s about a panic-induced, almost literal drowning.
But beneath that is a metaphorical suffocation: regret, addiction, spiritual guilt.
The detail “moving one toe was the only form of motion left” doesn’t feel written. It feels remembered.
It signals that terrifying moment when you know you’re conscious but can’t move—a detail many listeners connected with sleep paralysis.
A shadow figure appears in the corner. Fans have noted this as a classic sleep paralysis symptom, and the line:
“Figure in the corner laughing at me / Water fill my lungs, vision blurry” blurs spiritual terror with physiological panic.
As if guilt and fear have taken form. There’s a subtle tension between dread and restraint.
Each repetition of “it gets closer” builds, but the instrumental never does. The tension doesn’t spike. It holds.
The bridge reveals the track’s thesis:
“I’ve been baptized in fear, my dear / Like Paul, I’m the chief of sin.”
This isn’t mere spiritual language—it’s a direct callback to 1 Timothy 1:15, where Apostle Paul calls himself “the chief of sinners.”
But unlike Paul’s redemption, Abel isn’t offered absolution. The baptism here isn’t cleansing. It’s punishing.
By aligning himself with Paul while wandering through a psychological purgatory, The Weeknd breaks from his usual dichotomy of sinner/seducer and leans into something more haunting: the spiritual weight of guilt with no guaranteed salvation.
That theme becomes visceral in the official music video, released June 6, 2025.
Abel sits in a barren row of church pews before wandering an equally lifeless churchyard—a cinematic visual Billboard described as “a purgatory he must endure, fighting for rebirth.”
There are no flames. Just stillness and marble. A cold kind of damnation.This image of purgatory fits The Weeknd’s larger narrative.
What’s particularly noteworthy is how a track that wasn’t released as an official single has gained such traction.
Unlike the album’s promoted singles Timeless, São Paulo, and Cry for Me, Baptized In Fear has become a fan-driven phenomenon, suggesting that the lyrics struck a particularly deep chord with audiences.
With no radio push, it still reached #46 on the Billboard Hot 100, #12 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart, and charted across New Zealand, Greece, and India.
Musically, the song abandons his usual pop structures. The instrumental is minimal, with light touches from Mike Dean’s mixing and OPN’s synth atmospheres.
There’s a moment of breathlessness mid-track—Abel gasps rather than sings.
One listener pointed out it makes you breathless too, trying to keep up with the lines. It’s less a song and more an environment you’re forced to sit inside.
And then the voices return:
“Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on.”
Repeated like a mantra. Or maybe a hallucination. Whether they’re real or imagined doesn’t matter. They become a lifeline.
Critics agreed. Billboard ranked it the second-best track on the album, behind Until We’re Skin & Bones, calling both a return to form for The Weeknd’s darker, more confessional writing.
Fans on Reddit called it “the most emotionally raw” track on Hurry Up Tomorrow.
There’s no clean redemption arc in Baptized In Fear, but there is survival. That matters. For an artist who once wallowed in numbness, this feels like something else entirely: awareness.
The song doesn’t end with resolution. It ends with the possibility of it.
In a year flooded with conceptual albums, Baptized In Fear doesn’t posture. It haunts. It lingers.
It leaves you asking: if this is what baptism sounds like, what kind of salvation are we waiting for?
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The Weeknd Baptized In Fear Lyrics
Intro
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Ooh, no, ooh, no, shit
Verse
I fell asleep in the tub, I was met with paralysis
My foot hit the faucet, water started flowing in
Couldn’t scream for help, I just slowly felt the pressure hit
Moving one toe was the only form of motion left
Can’t breathe for air, can’t breathe
Trying to remember everything that my preacher said
Tryna right my wrongs, my rеgrets filling up my head
All the timеs I dodged death, this can’t be the way it ends, no
Pre-Chorus
Figure in the corner I can’t quite see (Quite see)
I just know the shadow’s staring at me
It gets closer, it gets closer, it gets closer now
Figure in the corner laughing at me (At me)
Water fill my lungs, vision blurry
Heartbeat slower, heartbeat slower, heartbeat slower
Chorus
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Bridge
I’ve been baptized in fear, my dear
I’ve been the chief of sin
Washing my soul within
I’ve been baptized in fear, my dear
Like Paul, I’m the chief of sin
Washing my soul within, oh
Pre-Chorus
Figure in the corner I can’t quite see (Quite see)
I just know the shadow’s staring at me
It gets closer, it gets closer, it gets closer now
Figure in the corner laughing at me (At me)
Water fill my lungs, vision blurry
Heartbeat slower, heartbeat slower, heartbeat slower
Chorus
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
Voices’ll tell me that I should carry on
