Album review
The Weeknd is crowned the new King of Pop
The Weeknd underlines with his new album that he is one of the greats in the international pop business. Photo: Perry Knotts / NFL / AP / dpa
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With “Blinding Lights” the Canadian Abel Tesfaye had one of the biggest hits of the past few years. Now The Weeknd is cementing its reputation as the new king of pop business.
The first important album of the year by a big pop star should also be one of the most successful: Abel Tesfaye aka The Weeknd has struck again.
The 31-year-old’s vocal art – combined with R’n’B, disco beats and 80s synth sounds – comes across on his fifth album, “Dawn FM”, in a dark and light way at the same time. A lot sounds like Giorgio Moroder, Daft Punk – and again Michael Jackson.
The Weeknd sits firmly on the throne of the international music market. For “Starboy” the Canadian brought Daft Punk, Kendrick Lamar and Lana del Rey into the studio a good four years ago. This time around, Tyler The Creator and Lil Wayne are featured as feature artists.
The first single was not exactly indicative of sensitivity, because even if “Take My Breath” seems to revolve around the sexual practice of breathing reduction and strangulation, it is in the middle of a pandemic with the coronavirus disease Covid- 19, at which millions can no longer breathe, something wrong.
Jim Carrey moderates
The second single released from the album, for which a video has now also been released, is called “Sacrifice”. It sounds like “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson. Here too – as with “Take My Breath” or “How Do I Make You Love Me” – the Swedish hit producer Max Martin and the dance project Swedish House Mafia were involved. They are world hits, even if none seems as strong as the huge hit “Blinding Lights” from 2020, which made many think of Jackson’s “Beat it”.
«Dawn FM» presents itself as a concept album. Hollywood star Jim Carrey (“The Mask”, “The Grinch”) leads through the numbers as a kind of radio presenter: “You are now listening to 103.5 Dawn FM”, he introduces the fictional station. “You’ve been in the dark for way too long. It’s time to walk into the light … », listeners are greeted.
The album aims to lead listeners out of the dark – “Dawn” means “Morgendämmerung” in German. On the cover you can see a very aged weekend. The texts deal with trauma, depression, love problems – but also with dealing with them. The narrative singing self is not particularly personable and seems to be psychologically unstable.
In “Here We Go … Again” there is a passage in the text that his new girlfriend is a movie star. That heated up the rumor mill that alludes to Angelina Jolie. Abel Tesfaye has been seen more often over the past few months with the actress, who is 15 years her senior. However, a romance has not been confirmed.
In «Gasoline» the singer is hardly recognizable because he sings large parts with a British accent. The song sounds like Depeche Mode. The Weeknd understood like no other male pop star that it is hardly enough to just throw a collection of songs on the market today. The music has to make you sit up and take notice, also offer a (visual) narrative.
Career start on the Internet
The video clips of his album “After Hours”, released at the start of the pandemic in March 2020, were related in terms of content and always showed him in the scenario of a horror film or gangster milieu. Tesfaye partied in it, sped his car, had incidents, was beaten up, bled, looked like a zombie.
In this way, The Weeknd, who started out as an anonymous artist on the Internet from his home in Toronto in 2010, still maintains his mysterious image. The gloomy bad boy staging rarely goes with the bright dance sound, but it definitely fits in well with a mythical pop business. Who wants the transparent, always nice star that you know everything about?
Tesfaye was born in Toronto in 1990 to an Ethiopian immigrant. As a teenager he was addicted to drugs. He dropped out of school and left home for a weekend, which is also what his name “Weekend” refers to, but which he deliberately spelled wrongly “Weeknd” because of a Canadian band of the same name.
With Quincy Jones
The new king of pop is becoming more and more of a total work of art. As it seems to be in the streaming age, he is planning a series on television program provider HBO for 2022. “The Idol” is supposed to be about a pop singer who hooks up with a club owner in Los Angeles who is also a sect leader.
The Weeknd made the connection to the “King of Pop” Michael Jackson, who died in 2009, not only with his songs, but also with an album appearance by music producer Quincy Jones. With this Jackson once recorded his most successful albums (“Thriller”, “Bad”). In a track less than two minutes long, the now 88-year-old tells how growing up without a mother influenced his later relationship with women. When there was too much closeness, he broke up, partly out of revenge, partly out of fear. Here psychoanalysis becomes pop – or vice versa.