During an episode of SmackDown near the end of March, WWE announced that the Weeknd’s “Timeless”—a collaboration with Playboi Carti taken from Weeknd’s sixth studio album, 2025’s Hurry Up Tomorrow—would serve as the official theme song for WrestleMania 41, a stacked two-night card that’s set to take place in Las Vegas over Easter weekend and features John Cena vying for the Undisputed WWE Championship possibly for the final time in his pro wrestling career.
WrestleMania Season
For those keeping score at home, this is the sixth Weeknd-scored WrestleMania theme. In 2020, the nightmarish Vegas fever dream of “Blinding Lights” was used as the backdrop for the first pandemic-era WrestleMania; that made some sense, as the two-night ordeal was mostly shot in front of no audience at WWE’s Performance Center and featured a number of cinematic flourishes executed with the goal of elevating the product. For WrestleMania 38, WWE picked the Dawn FM standout “Sacrifice.” That made a little less sense: was “Stone Cold” Steve Austin sacrificing his time to beat Kevin Owens’s ass? Am I to believe that Brock Lesnar or Roman Reigns were pumping iron ahead of their main event to this high-energy number? Wrestling’s biggest event is somehow becoming synonymous with the Weeknd, even if it’s hard to tell if the songs actually fit.
But what is an official theme for a pro wrestling event supposed to do, anyways? Are we just looking for a popular song that will get the majority of the crowd hype? Something more thematically relevant? And no matter the answers to those two questions, there’s still a bigger one: Why the Weeknd?
As a lifelong pro wrestling enthusiast, I’ve actually never given much thought to the “official theme song” for WWE’s annual WrestleMania event, a.k.a. the “Showcase of the Immortals,” a.k.a. the biggest party wrestling can throw. But since every good party needs a soundtrack, ever since WrestleMania I, WWE has made sure to have a theme. “What the hell would make a song an official theme for WrestleMania,” you ask? Great question; I wish I had an answer. For WrestleMania I, WWE selected Phil Collins and Phillip Bailey’s “Easy Lover,” which, yes, sounds weird. Aretha Franklin’s bop “Who's Zoomin Who?” served as the official theme for WrestleMania III—although most remember Franklin doing double-duty for her rendition of “America the Beautiful” that same night—and, no disrespect to a queen like Aretha, but I am genuinely confused at the choice of using this grown-folks club banger for a ’Mania that featured classics bouts like Steamboat-Savage. That said, WWE fell into a rhythm after that; for three of the most iconic WrestleManias (VI, VII, and VIII), legendary WWE musical theme creator Jim Johnston’s “Grand Spectacle” was all you needed. It was basically the wrestling version of John Tesh’s “Roundball Rock.”
And then WWE topped themselves in 1993 with “WrestleMania,” an uptempo number featuring Bret Hart, the Big Boss Man, and other wrestling stars. In 2025, “WrestleMania” sounds like one of the cheesiest attempts to appeal to the then-emerging world of hip-hop in the early ’90s, but I can’t front: when the bushes outside of my house start to go green, I know that it’s “oooh, oooh—time for—WRESTLEMANIA!”
As WWE hit the 2000s, there was a clear shift. Limp Bizkit let you know it was their way for the official WrestleMania X-Seven theme, opening the door for a number of similarly inclined rock bands. Saliva, 3 Doors Down, AC/DC, Audioslave, and others had the WrestleMania official theme song game sounding like, well, a wall of the guitars. This was more or less the vibe until WrestleMania 27(!!!); whoever picked “Written In the Stars” by London’s own Tinie Tempah took a big risk, but it had the anthemic, arena-filling vibe that would hit perfectly as the soundtrack to champions holding up their titles and reveling in their triumphs. It was indeed a shift, though—for many WWE fans, heavy rock had come to embody ’Mania season. Nevertheless, from there WrestleMania leaned further and further into pop-heavy major names, tapping everyone from Madonna to Eminem, Metallica, Machine Gun Kelly, and Flo Rida.
What does that even mean, though? Since WrestleMania IX, WWE has been trying its best to build an all-encompassing presentation, from the design of the ramp and walkway to, yes, the music. And whether it’s been the hardest of rock or hip-hop with the beefiest 808s, WWE’s choice of music can tell you what they’re chasing: in the early days, a measure of legitimacy; at the turn of the century, a sense of rebellion; and now, a feeling of grandeur on par with an artist who’s done the Super Bowl halftime show.
No matter the era, the one real requirement for the official theme of WrestleMania is that it needs to be dope enough to either evoke the proper emotion of a given year’s main storylines or work well within a highlight package. On that level, “Timeless” fits, with its lyrics running parallel to the Cody Rhodes–Cena storyline and Seth Rollins’s quest to solidify his legacy. The larger question of why the Weeknd has become the poet laureate of WrestleMania is less easily answered. Maybe it’s his mystique; the way his level of spectacle matches WWE’s level of spectacle. Maybe it’s just his ability to reliably deliver a song that can both slap and fade into the background.
Either way, I can’t get it out of my head. There’s no escaping it; any time WWE talks about ’Mania on their programming this week, “Timeless” is bound to play. It will essentially be on loop at Allegiant Stadium all weekend. And because we’re talking about John Cena—who is in the midst of his retirement tour—defeating Cody to become a 17-time WWE world champion, it works. He’d officially have more world title reigns than Ric Flair. The post-match highlight reels edit themselves. “It don’t matter what they say, I’m timeless.”
