The Weeknd - The Starboy of the Charts

Before becoming the biggest name in English-language pop - at least in terms of numbers, as the most-streamed artist on Spotify and even "the most famous artist in the world" according to the Guinness World Record - The Weeknd was simply Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, born in 1990 to Ethiopian parents in Toronto, Canada. A soul steeped in rhythm'n'blues, with hip-hop aggression projected toward bright electropop horizons. A young producer who set out, like so many others, with a suitcase shaped like a hard drive, stuffed with mixtapes ready to be posted on YouTube, fingers crossed for whatever came next. Nothing more than plain old grinding it out in the age of the World Wide Web. Talent aside - and it was evident from his first, magnificent trilogy of EPs - his trajectory has something miraculous about it, recalling the rise of pop idols from a different era, when stardom and celebrity were underpinned by a thriving record industry ready to launch the aspiring phenomenon of the moment into orbit. The Weeknd's extraordinary ascent, by contrast, happened against the grain - almost an unnatural exception to the race-to-the-bottom logic of today's music business. And it was built entirely on the new tools available: the web, streaming, the interplay of music, imagery and television production. All the way to lighting up his "Blinding Lights" (incidentally, the most-streamed song of all time on Spotify) on that global stage which today struggles mightily to keep new idols alive, often chewing them up and spitting them out before their time.
The string of accolades racked up in just a few years is equally staggering: four Grammy Awards, eighteen Billboard Music Awards, five American Music Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, thirteen Juno Awards, one MTV Europe Music Award and an Oscar nomination (for "Earned It", recorded in 2014 for the soundtrack of "Fifty Shades of Grey").
An electroboy with retro tastes. His crystalline falsetto can't help but evoke Jacksonian vibrations, though filtered through a distinct vocal identity that critic J.D. Considine locates in a different use of tremolo, since "The Weeknd tends to favor the melisma typical of Arabic music over Michael Jackson's typical blues phrasing". Indeed, The Weeknd has always referred to Jackson as the idol of his childhood, calling him "like a father" and stating that the album "Off The Wall" in particular inspired his singing. The fact remains that his clear, angelic voice - angelic even when singing of lascivious, hallucinatory nights - has become one of the most recognizable and beloved pop trademarks of the 2000s. And the perfectly oiled machine of his After Hours til Dawn Tour - soon arriving in Italy too (Milan, Ippodromo Snai, July 26 and 27) - is merely its latest, glittering proof.

From the Trilogy to the Promised Land

Abel Makkonen Tesfaye was born on February 16, 1990 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is the only child of Makkonen Tesfaye and Samrawit Hailu, a couple of Ethiopian immigrants who had moved to Canada in the late 1980s. He spent his youth in the Scarborough district, in difficult circumstances: his father left the family early on, and it was mostly his maternal grandmother who raised him, while his mother worked to support the household, splitting her time between jobs as a nurse and in a restaurant and attending night school to learn English. It was his grandmother who taught him Amharic, the Semitic language he speaks as his first tongue, and who also encouraged him to attend an Ethiopian Orthodox church. They were turbulent years, which Abel would later describe as "the movie Kids, without the AIDS", recounting how he started smoking marijuana at age 11, moved on to harder drugs during his high school years, and even committed petty thefts at supermarkets with a school friend.
After attending West Hill and Birchmount Park schools without graduating, at 17 he began writing songs, first alongside producer The Noise, in a soft R&B vein, then, in 2010, forming the group The Weekend with another producer, Jeremy Rose. Legend has it that the chosen name was directly inspired by the moment he dropped out of high school. But the existence of a Canadian band with the same name forced young Tesfaye to alter it for copyright reasons to The Weeknd. This would become his solo moniker. Because by age 20, Abel already had crystal-clear ideas - and knew exactly how to spread them in the digital age: by uploading his first tracks to YouTube, including one made with rapper Drake.
He thus began seeding the web with tracks like "What You Need", "Loft Music" and "The Morning". Within weeks, in the most classic of scripts, an explosion of clicks and shares changed his life almost overnight. His sound was a mix of samples lifted from the indie landscape (see Beach House's "Gila" in "Loft Music") folded into an electro-R&B context that never overwhelmed rhythmically, held together by barely-sketched laptop tinkering and electronic noise offsetting an essentially soul-based fabric. This intriguing blend of intentions is borne out by the three splendid EPs released over time, with the complicity of producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo: "House Of Balloons", "Thursday" and "Echoes Of Silence", later collected in the definitive Trilogy, released on Republic Records.

These are borderline scenarios, already as notorious as they are controversial, running through the course of these records: tales of ruin, sex and substance abuse, staged by Tesfaye's evocative, feminine-tinged voice. Thanks to "House Of Balloons" in particular, The Weeknd became the new icon of a musical trend - a blend of soul and electronics - that was enjoying particular fortune at the time, with the concurrent breakthrough of a London wunderkind named James Blake being just one example. With "Thursday", the attempt to reaffirm the depth of these portraits of nocturnal dissolution becomes more evident, starting with the vehement "Lonely Star", an emotional j'accuse that ignites in a chorus punctuated by obsessive drumming. The exasperating narrative tension continues with the industrial distortions of "Life Of The Party", before ethereal piano notes fill the air as "Thursday" gradually slips away. From the very first tracks, one of the traits that distinguishes this second mixtape, both thematically and in mood, emerges clearly: a greater pathos envelops the storytelling, dwelling mostly in territories of resignation and memory rather than promise and celebration; this emotional shift translates into a sound that is more nuanced and stretched out, with greater atmosphere and room effects.
We thus find the soft swoon, laced with ethnic touches, of "The Zone", which leads into the spasm of separation on "The Birds Pt.1", alongside the opening track, the album's most immediate moment. Only an acoustic guitar underscores the solitary lament of "Rolling Stones", before the atmosphere grows dense again with the closing "Heaven Or Las Vegas", a slow post-dubstep crawl, a nocturnal prayer of final farewell to God.
Even in his sampling choices, The Weeknd displays remarkable versatility, drawing on unexpected names such as Siouxsie and the Banshees (the sample of "Happy House" in "House Of Balloons"), Cocteau Twins and Martina Topley-Bird. His range of influences is indeed broad: by his own admission, it stretches from the Jackson icon to rap figures like 50 Cent, Wu-Tang Clan and Eminem, to Anglo-rock icons like David Bowie, The Smiths, Bad Brains and Talking Heads, all the way to the velvety pop shades of Lana Del Rey.

The mixtape trilogy served as the launchpad for his debut album, released under the best of auspices for the young Canadian, ready to break through the wall of indie cliquishness in its current electro-soul form. Kiss Land (2013) was produced with shrewd meticulousness. Its sounds point in a new direction. On one hand, his excellent ear for production seems to have found the right balance through a dark, dense electronic sheen; on the other, the excessive chase for melody-at-all-costs often ends up collapsing into blatant, shameless lifts disguised as quick extracts.
So, on "Adaption", the unforgettable "Bring On The Night" by The Police is openly stretched into an R&B-beat reverb, while on "Belong To The World" the entire rhythm section is lifted almost wholesale from Portishead's "Machine Gun". In short, the line between plagiarism and sampling at times seems to have lost its sacred ambiguity.
Still, there are moments where young Abel relies more on himself, showing off his own qualities, as on the opening "Professional", split as it is into two acts - a soft, ethereal curtain-raiser and an immaculate change of pace at the three-minute mark meant to catch listeners off guard, even though yet another borrowing (Emika's "Professional Loving") lurks once again around the corner. The same goes for "Love In The Sky", skillfully lifted skyward by a fat synth line evoking the eighties and a thinly veiled fear of the world driving his warm, in some ways still unrefined, voice.
In truth, what shakes the young Canadian musician is a vague terror of unknown spaces, as he himself has repeatedly stated. A hidden fear of darkness fills both Abel's lyrics and his mind. Directors like John Carpenter, David Cronenberg and Ridley Scott feed his imagination. The mood is accordingly dark and, in some ways, "chaotic". The brooding use of synths signals generally gloomy, vibrating atmospheres. Even so, things work only intermittently, oscillating between an overly lifeless melody ("Tears In The Rain") and an insubstantial electro-flavored sprint ("Wanderlust").
In conclusion, the debut album shows a Tesfaye only partially able to polish and perfect his personal musical world, made up of barely discernible extracts, twisted into shape until recently much like an overseas Jamie Woon magically disguised as a hipster. Then again, his young age suggests as much. And it could hardly be otherwise.

Shades of Success

After two years spent collaborating with well-established stars like Sia and Ariana Grande, The Weeknd scores another hit with the lush, lascivious "Earned It (Fifty Shades Of Grey)", which winks at the world of Prince. It earns an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song and wins Best R&B Performance. The video for the track is directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson, director of the film "Fifty Shades of Grey", and also features the film's star, Dakota Johnson. It's one of the standout tracks on the tracklist of his sophomore album Beauty Behind The Madness (2015), the record that would launch The Weeknd into orbit, earning quadruple Platinum status and a Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album.
It's no easy feat to transform, credibly and successfully, from indie prospect praised by specialist webzines and industry insiders into a globally beloved popstar. The risk is always the same: disappointing and alienating early admirers while failing to be cool and immediate enough to catch the attention of the wider public. But Abel Tesfaye shows such determination and instinct that he manages to win over a remarkably broad audience. Hence the inevitable, definitive statement of intent: turning to the most in-demand hitmaker of the past twenty years, Max Martin, to craft that small jewel of syncopation over a killer bassline that is "Can't Feel My Face" - probably the track that least makes you miss Michael Jackson since Justin Timberlake's solo debut. With a voice so smooth and vibrant, after all, who better than The Weeknd to spare us the longing - having already, years earlier, delivered a rough and thoroughly successful cover of "Dirty Diana" and immediately doubling down on the idea with the even more sparkling "In The Night", which sounds as if it were lifted straight from the "Bad" sessions.
Tesfaye proves he's no amateur - after all, whoever wrote gems of the caliber of "Wicked Games" or "Lonely Star" couldn't be - and the album's success doesn't hinge entirely on cumbersome comparisons to idols of the past, avoiding a complete betrayal of the style that had earned him so much acclaim. The backbone rests entirely on his by-now trademark languid melodies, laid over sinuously minimal backing tracks: some run through with faint electric jolts (most notably "Often", a refined yet filthy ode to female ejaculation), others shrouded in sinister industrial landscapes that leave a mark ("Real Life" and "The Hills").
As though we were looking at his own "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" in terms of ambition and inspiration, none other than Kanye West turns up to lend a hand behind the vintage-futurist pairing of the excellent "Tell Your Friends", which perfectly follows the irresistible funk-soul phrasing of "Losers", where The Weeknd sounds more like a modern-day Bill Withers than the pop version of his friend and mentor Drake.
Beauty Behind The Madness is an elegant butterfly, but alas it hides a sting in its tail, whose venom makes all too bitter the choice - pure marketing and dollars - to hand the stage over to showman Ed Sheeran and bore us with the stale electro-blues of "Dark Times". The pairing with Lana Del Rey works a bit better, their stylistic aims at least seeming more aligned, but what the troubled "Prisoner" offers adds little to what's already been expressed, beyond an undeniable touch of glamour.
And when the AOR-style bombast of the power ballad "Angel" bursts in, one resigns oneself to the idea that some compromise was inevitable if he wanted to keep pace with Frank Ocean, Miguel and their (excellent) indie-singing company. Small consolation that this goal was achieved through tracks that are more tedious than blatantly chart-courting, and that, ultimately, none of the beauty found in the previous eleven tracks is diminished in the slightest.
The album's success amounted to nothing less than the crowning of a first-rate popstar with a solid apprenticeship behind him and his talent fully intact: something that hadn't happened in a while on the overseas mainstream scene, and which was sorely needed. Other stars soon began vying for him through features and collaborations: he guests on Kanye West's single "FML", included on Kanye West's album "The Life Of Pablo", with whom he had already worked on "Tell Your Friends"; he teams up with rapper Future on the single "Low Life" (taken from his "Evol"); he joins Beyoncé on "6 Inch", one of the standout tracks from the multi-award-winning "Lemonade"; and he's chosen by Rihanna as the opening act for the European dates of her Anti World Tour alongside Big Sean, only to later have to pull out in order to focus on work for his new album.

A Star's Manifesto

Having truly become a "fucking starboy", The Weeknd finally feels free to do pretty much whatever he wants. Like releasing, just a year after the previous bestseller Beauty Behind The Madness, a new, equally long album titled Starboy (2016) which, while once again showing off high-profile guests, partly abandons the traits that had made his recent output so appealing to the mainstream.
In search of greater rigor, this time Abel Tesfaye strips down the funkier sounds to the bone (a faint trace remains in "Sidewalks", featuring the ever-present Kendrick Lamar), prefers the aggressive electro-punk rhythms of "False Alarm" to industrial clangs, and shuns easy radio-friendly hooks in favor of fashionable club sounds (the UK house of "Rockin'" and the pulsing "Secrets", which masterfully samples The Romantics and early Tears For Fears).
Without reaching the austerity of his early work, the soul of Starboy lingers over a dozen shades of the gorgeous title track and unfolds as a slow continuum that rarely slips into mawkish nu-soul predictability ("True Colors" and "Attention") and more often remains miraculously poised between the narcotic and the enchanting ("Reminder" and "Nothing Without You" among the best).
The ghost of Michael Jackson continues to haunt Tesfaye's ideas and chord choices, both in the slow tracks – above all the flawless "I Feel It Coming" feat. Daft Punk, a midtempo electropop steeped in synths and 80s riffs – and in the fleeting forays onto the more elegant dancefloors ("Love To Lay" and "A Lonely Night"). Unlike the cunning Bruno Mars, intent on paying tribute to his idol and similar acts to the point of near-parody, the Canadian, as much a lover of trip-hop as of soul, sets out to translate the King of Pop's lesson into a darker, more paranoid and sexually sweltering dimension, one that Jackson's own work only grazed through striking lyrics rather than music.
In this balancing act between vintage and futurism, nothing could fit better than the collaborations with Daft Punk and the renewed one with muse Lana Del Rey (not only on "Stargirl Interlude" but also on the alienating "Party Monster"); perfect allies to help The Weeknd draft his definitive manifesto, one that not even usually overbearing producers like Max Martin or Diplo manage to scribble over.
Something could perhaps have been trimmed, some of the romanticism dried out ("Die For You"), and the tracklist better shuffled to avoid excessive uniformity especially towards the end, but by now it's clear that, between violent short films and luxury cars, presumption and megalomania too have become an integral part of his stylistic signature.
It's all part of the game, an inevitable consequence of fame… Then again, once you make a pact with pop music, plenty of other excesses are hard to swallow.

With Starboy, The Weeknd wins another Grammy in the same category, thus making history as the first artist to win the same award twice. Meanwhile, he returns the favor to Lana Del Rey, featuring on the duet of her single "Lust For Life", included on the New York singer's album of the same name.

Then, catching everyone off guard, The Weeknd releases My Dear Melancholy (2018), a six-track project that debuts at number one on the Billboard Top 200 for the third time in a row: "Pray For Me" feat. Kendrick Lamar is also featured in the trailer for "Black Panther", the Oscar-winning film.
With the lightness of someone who has nothing left to lose, Tesfaye brings back – as the title itself suggests – the more melancholic and passionate side of his artistic personality, the one we had come to know at the start of his career and thought had been relegated to the past by now. Inspired by his recent breakup with singer Selena Gomez, My Dear Melancholy is made up of six mournful electro-R&B ballads, as nocturnal and glacial as the most affecting moments of "House Of Balloons", "Thursday" and "Echoes Of Silence" (his first three, superb, mixtapes). Twenty-two minutes of pain and longing, in which Abel's falsetto emerges, torn, from an ocean of synthetic, shadowy waves.
In the production booth we find top-tier names, from Nicolas Jaar to Skrillex, from Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo to Gesaffelstein (even credited as a featuring artist on "Hurt You" and "I Was Never There"), but none of them adds a significant touch to a work that sounds too personal and heartfelt to leave room for contamination. The shadowy funk-soul of "Try Me", the paranoid tension of "I Was Never There", the pained elegy of "Privilege" are the high points of a work that may lack the magic and luxurious ambiguity of his early output, but is fueled by the same creative vein, and for that reason, now more than ever, convincing and reconciling.

Meanwhile The Weeknd also finds a way to make his film debut, playing himself in the acclaimed thriller "Uncut Gems" (2019) by Josh and Benny Safdie, distributed worldwide by Netflix.

Blinding Lights and FM Idols

In 2020, he's already ready with another knockout blow: the new single "Blinding Lights", a track with an eighties synthetic flavor that quickly proves to be a new worldwide hit. It reaches number one in over thirty countries, and becomes the soundtrack of Mercedes-Benz's EQC campaign too. It's the hit of 2020, sitting third on Spotify's Daily Global Chart with almost two billion streams.
The single drags the album After Hours (2020) to success with it, which will rack up 190 million streams on Spotify and 53 million views on YouTube. Not a concept album, nor a simple collection of singles, but something more. In his new album, The Weeknd becomes both director and lead of a genuine film in music, a tale of perdition with a cinematic cut centered on the dark backstage of the life of a popstar haunted by the demons of his past. Between fiction and reality, that popstar is him, and the choice to keep the boundary between the two deliberately blurred is exactly what gives the record, and therefore its songs, that extra, compelling tension.
With a renewed look, part Michael Jackson, part eighties sex symbol, Abel Tesfaye now chooses to turn his life into a psychological thriller with pulp and hallucinated undertones, black as night and red as blood, already foreshadowed by the macabre tones of the video trilogy that preceded the album.
The record plays out as a melancholic dance between vintage synthesizers, broken hearts, drugs and unchecked luxury; and it's Las Vegas, Sin City, that serves as the temple where the human tragedy told in these songs plays out. From the very first listens, two conflicting opinions clash in your head. On one hand, there's the ever-deepening conviction that the dark, lustful R&B that The Weeknd effectively patented ten years ago can no longer sustain an entire album. Even trying to vary the theme – the trap of "Heartless", the broken rhythms of "Too Late", the drum 'n' bass of "Hardest To Love" – we're still faced with a good half of the tracklist that's simply filler, the usual glue that gives the album that reassuring, harmless cohesion punctually found in every new Tesfaye album. And yet, there's a strange excitement that comes with engaging with this work, as if we were once again able to feel the thrill of the event.
Setting aside its weaker notes, with this 2020 release The Weeknd managed to rouse the "spirit" of the pop album from its torpor, delivering a blockbuster to be consumed breathlessly, something to entertain and move us all together, live. Like a new film that breaks box-office records, that's what the theatrical, super-pop After Hours is. And its best scenes of tension are its most uninhibited, crowd-pleasing songs, like the hi-fi power ballad "Scared To Live", the pulsing nocturnal languor of "After Hours", or the deadly synth-wave section made up of "In Your Eyes", "Save Your Tears" and the splendid "Blinding Lights", whose epic, romantic keyboard sweep perfectly conveys the idea of "drowning in the night" sung in its lyrics.
"I'm that nigga with the hair/ singin' 'bout poppin' pills, fuckin' bitches, livin' life so trill", sang Abel Tesfaye five years earlier. And despite his good intentions, that's exactly where we find him again in the middle of this album, on his knees, on the ground, at the end of the journey: "I don't wanna touch the sky no more", he sings in the closing "Until I Bleed Out", "I just wanna cut you from my dreams, until I bleed out". It's the touching ending of an album you can almost listen to with your eyes, where the glittering production work (among the names, Daniel Lopatin and Kevin Parker) has the same satisfying effect as what in film would be called a "stunning cinematography".
For an artist who has never hidden his dissolute life, an album so intertwined with his persona, so dark and at the same time so accessible, is simply a triumph of pop art. It's not so much Las Vegas, as said before, but The Weeknd's own career that becomes the stage for his tragedy. And this album, with all its lies and flaws, is a portrayal of it that is as sincere as it is captivating.

With After Hours, The Weeknd stays anchored at number 1 on the Billboard 200 for four consecutive weeks, setting another record: he's the first artist to rank number one simultaneously not only on the Billboard but also on the Hot 100 and Artist 100 charts. With these numbers, After Hours becomes the number 1 streaming R&B album of all time, followed by Starboy at number 2.
A new flurry of collaborations follows: the single "Smile" with the late rapper Juice Wrld (from the album "Legends Never Die"), "Over Now" for DJ Calvin Harris, the hit "Off The Table" alongside Ariana Grande (from "Positions"), the first collaboration with Maluma titled "Hawái Remix" (for the deluxe edition of the album "Papi Juancho") and the remix of "Blinding Lights" alongside new Spanish star Rosalía (with a subsequent reprise on "La fama"), and again "Tears In The Club" with FKA Twigs, "Poison" for the late Aaliyah, "One Right Now" by Post Malone, "Moth To A Flame" by Swedish House Mafia, and the reunion with Kanye West for the single "Hurricane" (included on the album "Donda"), for which the two will win a Grammy for Best Collaboration with a Rap Artist.
Just to ride the wave, the compilation The Highlights (2021) is also released, conceived for his performance during the Halftime Show of Pepsi Super Bowl LV 2021, in which The Weeknd gathers his most celebrated tracks of the last decade.

In January 2022 it's time for his fifth studio album, Dawn FM, promoted internationally through his first stadium tour, the After Hours til Dawn Tour. As said, The Weeknd has by now reached the enviable position of someone who can do anything with the guarantee that, however badly it might go, in the worst-case scenario he'll still land on his feet. After all, his angelic voice proved to be a tranquilizer for all those who, during the stormy two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, tuned into his songs: in the dichotomy between calm and controversy, soothing melodies and ambiguous lyrics, one could indeed find that tension-and-release dynamic typical of a cathartic experience.
The interesting idea at the core of Dawn FM (2022) lies precisely in the full awareness of his songs' anxiolytic qualities, and in the ironic distance The Weeknd takes from them. The fictional "Dawn FM" that gives the album its title, as clarified by the various skits scattered between songs and voiced by actor Jim Carrey, recalls a hybrid between "The Matrix" and the "Life Extension" of "Vanilla Sky", a hypnotic radio broadcast able to instill calm and tranquility in its listeners until it annihilates every idea and will. The offer of an embrace as friendly as it is sinister, able to suck you into oblivion simply by endlessly indulging our pleasure (an allegory for capitalism? For entertainment? Or simply for the fan-service so dear to today's pop industry?).
The Weeknd goes back to playing with his image, but whereas on After Hours this served drama and theatricality, on Dawn FM it instead serves a sharper, double-edged irony, aimed both at the artist (just look at the cover) and at the public's perception of him and his music. In all this, the Canadian's great merit lies in not having changed the tone of the music, in not trying to make it somehow more grotesque or artificial. His idea of a song, polished also thanks to the ever-present hands of Daniel Lopatin, Max Martin and Oscar Holter, remains settled on a lavish, hyper-digitalized reinterpretation of 80s Black music tradition, full of glitter and glamour, in which, while soul is never absent, the dance accents are pushed further to the fore.
It's no coincidence that the guiding spirit of Michael Jackson hovers over the whole first part of the album, with grand melodic openings – shadowy in the convulsive "Gasoline", blazing in "Take My Breath", the story of a lethal erotic game set to obsessive beats and Moroder-style synth arpeggios – but also dense, sparkling grooves ("Sacrifice"), sophisticated synth-pop elegance ("How Do You Love Me?") and retro-soul ballads in grand style ("Out Of Time", where the keyboards have the same fragrance as old-school horns). Nor is it a coincidence that the sixth track is "A Tale By Quincy", a brief story of mistakes and lost family bonds told by the great Quincy Jones, the key producer behind the star of "Thriller". But the crucial turning point in the album's idea coincides with the skit at the end of "Out Of Time", in which Carrey's voice, slowed down within a magma of nocturnal keyboards, recites:

You're almost there, but don't panic. There's still some more music coming, before being completely enveloped by the blissful embrace of that little light you see in the distance. Soon you'll be healed, forgiven and refreshed. Free from every trauma, pain, guilt and shame. You might even forget your name, but before you settle into that house forever, here's thirty minutes of easy listening with some slow songs. On 103.5 dawn FM

The Weeknd is therefore the performer, but also the spectator and the omniscient narrator of this grand meta-musical show. In this case, his skill lies in not showing off as a provocative genius, but in hiding in the most impenetrable place, namely his own songs, so that the concept can only be discovered by listening to the album in full, certainly not on the radio or in playlists. And yet Dawn FM doesn't fully manage to ward off the risk inherent to works of this kind, ending up being as sophisticated an operation as it is a shrewd one, in which the only victims, in the end, remain the songs. Pulled this way and that between their eruptive pop nature and the need to fit into the provocative concept, they all hover around a shorter length, barely two-three minutes, very Spotify-friendly, in which, if on one hand the superior conceptual and aesthetic care is evident, on the other you notice a loss of momentum, of inspiration, with a resulting lack of surprises.
That doesn't take away from the fact that, taken out of the album's overall design, these "easy listening" songs remain excellently crafted, in the way they draw on the same romantic, larger-than-life soul that has driven the success of the Canadian's most recent hits – at the expense of the old "drugs in the glass" element which has now almost disappeared (unless "Dawn FM" is actually an allegory for drugs itself, in which case forget this whole review forever). "Here We Go… Again" (with Tyler, The Creator), "Starry Eyes", "Don't Break My Heart" know exactly which buttons to push, evoking the depths of night, intimacy, tinted windows, heartbeats, a sense of abandonment, and "Best Friend" and "Less Than Zero" do even better, the former sensual as it moves through its powerful synthetic vibrations, the latter driven by the aerodynamic lightness of a sparkling acoustic guitar.
If Dawn FM is a fake, it's certainly an auteur's fake that's not hard to be seduced by. And yet, whether it's the impossibility of ignoring the album's overall design, or the fact that this is the second album in which Abel insists on this kind of imagery, there's something about Dawn FM and its romanticism, its undeniable pop appeal, its charm, that inspires a certain detachment, the same one that makes you wrinkle your nose whenever form overwhelms substance. Or maybe we're just terribly tired of turning on the radio and finding flat, cookie-cutter music, so that a self-parody of narcotizing pop doesn't strike us as clever so much as grating and forgettable.
And in all this, why involve Jim Carrey? Just friendship, or is there yet another hidden, higher, meta meaning? Maybe Jim Carrey is there because "Dawn FM" also carries a bit of the existentialism of "The Truman Show", who knows, or maybe because in pop anything goes, and so this album is a grand comedic performance in which The Weeknd only partly gives himself away, behind a mask that bears his own face, behind a singer who has his own voice, and songs that are both poison and antidote in the way they soothe the very exasperation they force upon you.
In the uphill challenge of finding a follow-up to the most successful album in the world in recent years, Abel Tesfaye returned to the field with music that is both the subject and its own representation, defusing any possible backlash right from the start in a work where the ironic device, whatever judgment one wants to attach to it, is perhaps the only truly authentic artistic gesture to be found.

After playing himself in "Uncut Gems" by Josh and Benny Safdie and lending his voice to the TV series "American Dad!", "Robot Chicken" and "The Simpsons", and above all after composing an original track for the highly anticipated "Avatar: The Way of Water", the choral, drum-driven "Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)", Abel Tesfaye, an increasingly interplanetary pop star, has finally decided to take on an official soundtrack, composed for HBO's series "The Idol", on which he also acts as producer alongside director Sam Levinson ("Euphoria") and screenwriter Reza Fahim. The Weeknd plays Tedros, the shady owner of a Los Angeles club and leader of a secret cult, with whom young popstar Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp, Johnny's daughter) becomes entangled in a relationship. The production was accompanied by the inevitable controversy over its provocative, sexually explicit content.
If Tedros' character, whom Abel portrays skillfully, has a nature as elusive as it is dark, the melodies written from scratch are anything but hard to grasp, and in many respects they're in line with his latest output. In short: sweet ballads with airy synths that, in this case, follow the teachings of Giorgio Moroder, whom Tesfaye evidently draws inspiration from in his new role as an all-purpose composer for film and streaming platforms. Starting with "One Of The Girls", performed with JENNIE & Lily-Rose Depp, and "Dollhouse", this time alongside only Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny and Vanessa Paradis, who's also in the cast. The latter is a song so glossy it sounds like one of the many B-sides by Lana Del Rey, another star Tesfaye has collaborated with in the past.
Made up of six separate EPs released between June 9 and July 9, 2023, The Idol, Vol. 1 (Music From The Hbo Original Series) inevitably gathers key moments from the script to turn them into music, mostly passages where the tension and the sex scene of the moment are at their peak. Equally crowd-pleasing, but at the same time intense, is the cover of "My Sweet Lord" by George Harrison, performed for the occasion by Troye Sivan, who delivers a gospel version, sung however in a half-abandoned cathedral with the synth once again taking the lead toward the end. Then there's Madonna and Playboi Carti on "Popular", a single that puts The Weeknd up against a bold comparison with two stars worlds apart in time and in music. This time the pace is Caribbean while the lyrics explore the meaning of success and its undeniable pleasures.
Among the many other guests involved, Moses Sumney stands out on "Get It B4", the best-played track of the bunch, with a suspended rhythm and a warming, soulful comedy-like melody. "Double Fantasy" with Future is instead the other hit in classic The Weeknd style, Dawn FM phase, conceived without too much fuss to climb straight to the top with a hook that's sadly irresistible only on paper, into which the most classic of rap bridges is slotted. Between highs and lows, scattered vocal runs ("Take Me Back"), the instrumental "Devil's Paradise" stands out as it should, with the sax taking center stage before the synth briefly tries to steal the scene again.
The Idol, Vol. 1 (Music From The Hbo Original Series), aside from a few well-executed passages, is divisive and raises a question: who benefits from all this overproduction? Tesfaye, for sure. But those who've followed him from the start may, for now, care little about his new "actor-singer" guise. And in the end, that's fine too.

A reflection on death opens Hurry Up Tomorrow. Exactly, that's right. It's no joke, and Abel on "Wake Me Up", alongside Justice, Oneohtrix Point Never and the inseparable Mike Dean – present pretty much everywhere behind the boards – really is talking about nothingness, darkness and memories. And to push this thought of his into the air, he even uses a sample from the intro of Giorgio Moroder's "Main Title", from the Scarface soundtrack, and shortly after, just so nothing is missing from his calling card, he adds a drop of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", placed in the opening moments of the following "Cry for Me", complete with a beat borrowed from Diplo, recently also lifted by a Neapolitan neomelodic singer.
The unprecedented opening thought that Tesfaye elaborates is obviously tied to the incident at SoFi Stadium that the musician, understandably, will never be able to forget, namely when, during "Alone Again", his voice began to crack, ending up cutting the concert short amid boos.

So the third chapter of the trilogy that includes After Hours and Dawn FM couldn't have started in a more predictable way, at least on the instrumental level. In short, mannerism is dead, long live mannerism! as Tesfaye's fans might dare to shout, seeing as he's also recently gone around saying he wants to settle the score with the creature known as The Weeknd precisely with this record. So let the tired, overused cravings of the Canadian pop singer-songwriter of the last ten years come forth. Call it a self-referential postcard across all twenty-two tracks of an album as crowd-pleasing as it is, frankly, far too long. Starting with none other than the King of Pop, as they called him in the '90s, put back into circulation in every possible flavor for a good half of this outing too.

The start of this new electro-soul fair, all filtered little voices and synth-funk beats depending on the occasion, is a one-two punch, indeed, in syrupy peach tones, "São Paulo", sung as a duet with Anitta and premiered on Instagram for the NFL Brazil event on September 6, 2024, which does even worse, oops, even better, given the moombahton pirouette just staged and then blown apart with a spot-on change of pace, however tacky it still is.
Between one video-game interlude and the next, things proceed at a fairly brisk pace. On the heavily glossed existentialist ballad "Baptized In Fear", Lopatin resurfaces, useful here and there like a rug salesman, while "Open Heart" brings everything back to a French touch somewhere between Daft Punk, hence Justice, and Kavinsky aboard his Testarossa, with a spot-on refrain that instantly lodges itself in your head and under your skin and a crackling bass that never hurts. The reflections, this time of insecurity, come crashing in with a (mildly) tensed leg on the lumbering "Reflections Laughing", with Travis Scott stepping in on the second verse claiming he knows the fire and the lies of this world, drawing a smile even from some random house pet.

This first turn around the track reveals an album that's produced with the usual care and well-balanced in its pacing, though with a bit of dust in the drawer. Then “Enjoy the Show”, featuring Future on the bridge, suggests where old Abel is running best at this point in his career, namely among crooked arrangements, in dreams soon forgotten come morning, and in soulful territory conceived in his own way, naturally, but emotionally somewhere between Minnie Riperton and Erykah Badu.
The second half of Hurry Up Tommorow is decidedly less bombastic and raises the bar, even in its most eighties moments like “Take Me Back to La” and “Big Mercy”. Or in the ultra-romantic piano melody of “The Abyss”, complete with a dedication to his partner Sim Khadra.

In “Red Terror”, his parents' divorce resurfaces, and at the close Abel covers, as the title track, “In Heaven (Lady In The Radiator Song)” by David Lynch, a song the recently deceased American director wrote with Peter Ivers for Eraserhead. A tribute that elevates everything in the closing stretch of a work that is, on the whole, good, albeit unevenly so, and with a turn at the midway point that tells us Abel still has the wind at his back and is ready to kill The Weeknd in order to perhaps better take possession of himself and finally abandon, after some thoroughly enjoyable albums and singles, the moonwalker-style mannerism that works fine on paper, sure, but which at some point starts to smell pretty bad.

Contributions by Beniamino Cianferoni (“Thursday”)

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