Pop music — what’s left of it anyway — is a hodgepodge of styles and moods. A landing place for any number of likely and unlikely approaches more than a big flashing-red target, the way it was two or four decades ago. Even the poppiest stars of the day tend to filter their ambition through reluctance, which leaves a clear path for the Weeknd, an unlikely preservationist of mega-pop’s grand ambitions. No current pop star is more invested in the idea of pop’s majesty, its iridescent gloom, its exultant relief.
When the Weeknd began working with the hitmaker Max Martin, on the 2013 singles that would rocket him from cult leader to mainstream superstar, it took some balancing to maintain the fetid streak of misbehavior at his core while his music was becoming alarmingly shiny.
But that balance is old hat now. “After Hours,” his rousing fourth studio album, is laden with sparkled trauma, kaleidoscopic emotional confusion, urgent and panting physical release paired with failed-state romantic dyspepsia. For the Weeknd, being broken is a kind of thrill, in a way that being thrilled never could be.
On “After Hours” — which debuted this week at the top of the Billboard album chart — the songs are head fakes, cloaking their misery with exuberance. As ever, the Weeknd’s voice remains disarmingly pretty as he coos about flirtation and recrimination, his two main topics.
For a while, earlier in his career, it was unclear if the Weeknd had a heart. But now, even when he’s leaning toward bloodletting — say, on the plaintive “Hardest to Love” — he sounds as icy as on songs like “Scared to Live,” in which he wounds someone, then callously sends them back out into the wild to fend for themselves. There is always lingering sleaze in his sentiment — he is forever the squire who turned his back, the one who makes a promise only because it’s so freeing to break it.
Though his lyrics can be a little skeletal and raw, there is a loose through line here of becoming exasperated with California life. On “Escape From LA,” he lays out a taxonomy of a blurry type of foe: “L.A. girls all look the same, I can’t recognize/The same work done on they face, I don’t criticize.”
Drugs, or the intimation of them, remain one of his lodestars. “I don’t wanna touch the sky no more/I just wanna feel the ground when I’m coming down,” he exhales with fatigue on “Until I Bleed Out,” the album’s syrupy final song. On “Snowchild,” he briefly dips back into the after-hours bravado that marked his earliest mixtapes: “Walking in the snow before I ever made my wrist freeze/I was blowing smoke, had me dizzy like Gillespie.” (Typically, when the Weeknd raps, it can veer to the clunky, but this is among his better efforts.)
The Weeknd’s commitment to his bit can feel impersonal at times, especially when the amount of effects layered on his voice make him sound like he’s singing from just outside the studio walls, or from the deep beyond. It sounds like a voice that’s been inscribed into history, and is being resuscitated in order to rouse the masses.
Generally, he does so by drawing inspiration from the ecstatic pop of the 1980s, particularly Michael Jackson, a clear vocal influence. But the most striking and unanticipated turns on “After Hours” come when he pivots without sacrificing his gleam: “Too Late” has a peppy 2-step garage beat, and a flicker of industrial clangor near the end; “Hardest to Love” is rollicking big-room drum ’n’ bass à la Roni Size.
But the Weeknd also dabbles in abstraction, working with the electro-ambient miserablist Oneohtrix Point Never and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Repeat After Me (Interlude).” This album is both blatant and curious all at once. (See also the empathetic dub-house remix of the title track by the Blaze, one of several remixes released as bonus tracks.)
The rest of the album, though, doesn’t shy away from the Weeknd’s shimmery mid-80s luxuriance. The saxophone solo near the end of the satisfyingly electric “In Your Eyes” could be high-end Muzak (in the best way), and “Save Your Tears” has both tonal echoes of Depeche Mode’s melancholy and a nod to “Everything She Wants” by Wham!
And then there’s “Blinding Lights,” currently the No. 1 song in the country, which could have been lifted from a found Jazzercise tape from 1986, though the chilly synths have a slightly sinister tinge. It says a lot about the durability of the Weeknd’s early noir, the full commitment to the louche aesthetic he embodied — see his cameo in “Uncut Gems,” which depends on it — that even the raging centrist popularity of “Blinding Lights” can’t disinter it.
The song’s music video is appropriately traumatic, but on TikTok in recent days, the #blindinglightschallenge has been ubiquitous, among the most wholesome of all viral dances. Many of the most popular videos feature two sons dancing with their father: they are relentlessly doofy.
But the videos are short, and the music used is just the song’s intro — you never hear the Weeknd sing. It’s another way for him to slip onto the tip of everybody’s tongue while stowing away his feelings in the shadows.
The Weeknd
“After Hours”
(XO/Republic)
Source: Music - nytimes.com
