And soon, a whole album full of Abel Tesfaye musings like “Said I’m heartless / So much pussy it be falling out the pocket. A film produced by Mercedes-Benz, starring The Weeknd and featuring “Blinding Lights” drops on November 29. Another single, “Blinding Lights,” was released via a Mercedes-Benz commercial. Ladies, it’s a trap! But at least the beat is good. “Never need a bitch, I’m what a bitch needs / Trying to find the one that can fix me,” he opens the song. “Heartless” is his first single for an upcoming album and his first solo release since My Dear Melancholy came out in 2018. He’s too busy “sellin’ dreams to these girls with their guard down.” Dang. The Weeknd can’t come to the phone right now. Whether the somewhat contemptible character speaking in these songs is Tesfaye or a figment of his imagination, it's at least poignant, and it's not easy listening.While all the Christmas music playing in stores is telling you to cozy up with a special someone this winter, The Weeknd’s new song is an anti-cuffing-season anthem. It’s been fifteen months since the 26-year-old R&B artist formerly known as Abel. Kiss Land is his manifesto against seeking fame and living your dreams. A fter weeks of teasing it, The Weeknd dropped his third studio album, Starboy, late on Thanksgiving night. He is not asking the 14-year-olds who follow him on Twitter to twerk or roar or be like him. Compared to the ruling kings and queens of pop - Drake, Ocean, Gaga, Rihanna, Timberlake, Perry, Cyrus, et al - Tesfaye is a downright misanthrope. With Kiss Land, Tesfaye has created a compelling case for the artistic relevance of current pop music.
Everyone is listening no one is paying attention. It is an uneasy feeling, but also genuinely provocative.
Every song explores this theme, the lyrics reading like a series of unrequited sexts, and Tesfaye delivers them with such tension - and surrounds them with such heartless machinery - that the listener can't help but feel a little trapped in his matrix. There is very little nostalgia or perspective here, just a claustrophobic sense of someone bewildered by access. It's telling when the marquee Drake guest spot halfway through the album feels jarring and disruptive for its champagne-toasting banality. His version of modern love is no fun it's one built around blame, numbing overindulgence and cold sexual transaction. More than any of his contemporaries, Tesfaye personifies the anxiety, narcissism and ironic disconnect of the digital generation. Tesfaye's delicate voice, often breaking into a desperate whimper, constantly echoes off towering synthetic minor chords and spare, hydraulic drum patterns.
Tesfaye's new album, Kiss Land, is a glass-clad monolith to his jaded misogynist fantasies and melodramatic jet-setting, fascinating for both its futurist sonic template and its emotionally stunted hypersexuality.įrom the album's first line ("It's ideal, you need someone to tell you how to feel") to its last ("She forgot the good things about me / She let it slip away"), an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and dissociation sets in. He was the hermit gone wild, a lonely boy from Toronto with Michael Jackson's fragile tenor and a hard drive full of Portishead B-sides who suddenly had his pick of worldly women, but quickly became disillusioned by the paradox of choice. 10.Īfter his first songs appeared on the Internet in late 2010, The Weeknd's Abel Tesfaye slowly crept under the sheets between Drake's brokenhearted bravado and the confessional cynicism of Frank Ocean with a series of free mixtapes of increasingly dark, brooding pop.
The Weeknd's new album Kiss Land will be released on Sept.