Last year, The Weeknd’s 2019 single “Blinding Lights” became the biggest hit in US Billboard chart history, dethroning Chubby Checker’s “The Twist”. Separated by 60 years, both tracks share a nocturnal setting — but little else.
In “The Twist”, Checker exhorts his “little miss” to “twist all night” with him, meaning the dance craze, but also, nudge nudge, something else too. Meanwhile, in “Blinding Lights”, The Weeknd plays the part of lust-crazed, vampiric night-dweller driving through a “cold and empty” city in search of the fleeting heat of a carnal encounter. Cheery 1960s innuendo has been dislodged by brilliantly bleak 2020s hedonism.
“Blinding Lights” featured in the Canadian’s album After Hours, which capped his rise from alt-R&B beginnings in Toronto just over a decade ago to Los Angeles superstardom. Now, with the dawning of 2022, comes the surprise release of a companion album, Dawn FM.
Where its predecessor was about a long dark night of the soul, ending with the protagonist suffering some kind of breakdown, perhaps a drug overdose, the follow-up is themed around the idea of a heavenly radio station. The singer, real name Abel Tesfaye, asks us to “picture the album being like the listener is dead” and stuck in purgatory, listening to the voice of a celestial DJ, played on the album by Hollywood slapstick star and fellow Canadian Jim Carrey.
The cover shows Tesfaye, 31, as a much older man with a shell-shocked expression. Perhaps it mirrors a similar look of surprise at his record label when he explained that he was making a concept album about a purgatorial radio station featuring the eccentric Carrey. But the results show Tesfaye at the top of his game — he has found a way to blend commercial pop with an auteur’s individual vision.
The first half of Dawn FM picks up where After Hours left off. Mirror-shiny synth-pop evokes a world of bright lights and the brittle possibility of crack-ups. In “Gasoline”, Tesfaye reactivates The Weeknd’s decadent persona, “high again” at 5am, with racing thoughts set to a tense 1980s electronic soundtrack. His vocals are pitched lower than usual, making him sound like a British new wave act, but then he adopts his usual singing voice, a deceptively sweet, soulful croon. The juxtaposition conveys the sense of a fracturing identity.
“I know you’ll never find that missing piece,” he tells a lover who is trying to “fix” him on “Sacrifice”. The narcotic pun sums up the predicament of his Weeknd character, tormented by desires that can never be satisfied. Sex enters into a danse macabre with death on “Take My Breath”, set to irresistible dance music with superbly edited vocal effects. (Foremost among the album’s many producers is the US electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never, aka Daniel Lopatin.)
Other voices include two of rap’s most quixotic performers. Tyler, the Creator guests on “Here We Go . . . Again”, while Lil Wayne has an impish singsong cameo on “I Heard You’re Married”. In “A Tale by Quincy”, the venerable composer and producer Quincy Jones recites an unsettling story of his mother being taken away in a straitjacket when he was boy. The past’s persistence in the present is a recurrent theme, periodically elucidated in the stoner’s sermons by Carrey’s heavenly DJ.
The second half of the album slows down into pop-R&B balladry. At times, the tempo grows listless, as in the secular devotional “Starry Eyes”. But the plotting remains precise. “I’ve been so cold to the ones who loved me, baby,” Tesfaye confesses in “Out of Time”. In “Is There Someone Else?”, he accepts the karmic inevitability of a lover’s infidelity: “I don’t deserve someone loyal to me.” Redemption in Dawn FM comes with a Weeknd-style twist, the sinner who gets his just deserts.
★★★★☆
Available now on XO/Republic Records
The Weeknd tunes into Jim Carrey’s heavenly radio station on Dawn FM
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