The Weeknd has earned a platinum single in Canada for Too Late, certified by Music Canada on November 2, 2026 through XO and Republic Records. The award lands more than six years after the song arrived on After Hours, proof that the album’s deep cuts are still doing commercial work long after its singles peaked.
Too Late was never the headline single from After Hours. It opened the album’s second slot, all atmosphere and apology, while Heartless, Blinding Lights, In Your Eyes and Save Your Tears carried the radio campaign. A platinum certification in Canada represents 80,000 units, and album tracks do not reach that number on curiosity. They reach it because listeners kept returning, year after year, until a song that was track two on a 2020 album quietly became one of the most durable recordings in a catalogue full of them.
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Weeknd Too Late Platinum Award Arrives In Canada
The certification was dated November 2, 2026 in Music Canada’s Gold and Platinum database, with Too Late listed as a platinum single for The Weeknd on XO and Republic Records. The song was released on March 20, 2020, alongside the rest of After Hours, the Toronto singer’s fourth studio album. It runs three minutes and fifty-nine seconds, sitting directly behind the opener Alone Again, and it was co-written by Abel Tesfaye with Jason Quenneville, Carlo Montagnese and Eric Burton Frederic. Production came from Illangelo, Ricky Reed, The Weeknd and Daheala, with additional production from Nate Mercereau.
Those credits matter to the story. Illangelo and Daheala are the Toronto-rooted architects who helped build The Weeknd’s sound from the mixtape years forward, and Too Late is one of the purest examples of that partnership on After Hours: a record that sounds like a confession delivered at the exact moment it stops being useful. The lyrics circle a relationship damaged past the point of repair, with the singer apologizing for mistakes he already knows cannot be undone. It is the album’s thesis in miniature, which is part of why fans treated it as a centrepiece even while the singles charted higher.
A Deep Cut That Outlasted The Singles
The song’s life after release explains the plaque. Too Late was first teased in the After Hours short film, released on March 4, 2020, in a scene where Tesfaye adjusts his nose bandage after leaving the Jimmy Kimmel Live studio, an early piece of the visual world the album would build. When the full video for Too Late arrived on October 22, 2020, directed by the duo Cliqua, it extended that world into outright horror, and Pitchfork named it one of the best music videos of 2020. Videos like that do not just promote a song in its release window. They give it a second and third life in recommendations, playlists and late-night viewing, which is exactly how an album track accumulates the kind of numbers a certification eventually records.
After Hours itself debuted at number one in Canada and in more than twenty other countries, opening with 444,000 equivalent units in the United States. Its biggest songs became era-defining hits, but the album was sequenced as a single late-night arc, and Too Late is the moment that arc turns inward. Every certification the album and its songs collect now is really measuring the same thing: six years on, people are still playing the record front to back, and the tracks that were never serviced to radio are being carried by the fans who stayed.
After Hours Keeps Working At Home
The Canadian certification also fits a pattern iimiTV has been tracking through the fall. The Weeknd’s catalogue keeps setting new marks in 2026, from streaming milestones to a tour gross that has passed a billion dollars, and the home market keeps validating the work in its own formal way. Music Canada certifications are not chart positions that fade the following week. They are the industry’s permanent record, and a platinum single for a 2020 album track, dated November 2026, is the permanent record saying this song is still growing.
There is a Toronto angle that should not be missed. After Hours was made by a Scarborough singer with a core team that includes two of the most important producers the city has produced, at a moment when Toronto music was already a global export industry. When a record from that team earns a new Canadian plaque six years later, it is not nostalgia. It is the catalogue compounding, the way the strongest catalogues do, and it sets the floor for everything The Weeknd releases next.
Too Late began as the quiet second track on a very loud album. In Canada, it is now a platinum single, and the distance between those two facts is the story of how After Hours has aged: not as a moment, but as a catalogue that refuses to stop working.
