Tag: The Weeknd

Listened 2022 album by The Weeknd from Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

Dawn FM is the fifth studio album by Canadian singer-songwriter the Weeknd, released on January 7, 2022, through XO and Republic Records. It features narration by Jim Carrey, guest vocals from Tyler, the Creator and Lil Wayne, and spoken word appearances from Quincy Jones and Josh Safdie. As the album’s executive producers, the Weeknd, Max Martin and Oneohtrix Point Never recruited a variety of other producers such as Oscar Holter, Calvin Harris and Swedish House Mafia.

The Weeknd described the album’s concept as a state of purgatory—a journey towards the “light at the end of a tunnel”, serving as a follow-up to his fourth studio album After Hours (2020). Musically, Dawn FM is an upbeat record containing dance-pop and synth-pop songs that are heavily inspired by the 1980s new wave, funk and electronic dance music styles. The album received widespread acclaim from music critics, who complimented its production and melodies.

It has been interesting reading some of the reviews of Dawn FM.

The radio-station conceit does enhance the album’s nostalgic, one-step-removed feel, much the way an early 2010s-mixtape concept did for last year’s Tyler, the Creator album; Tyler guests here (somewhat forgettably) on the very yacht-rock-ish track, “Here We Go … Again.” Perhaps most valuably, the format gives Tesfaye and his producers—primarily his longtime collaborator Max Martin and more recent helpmate Daniel Lopatin (a.k.a. Oneohtrix Point Never)—greater license to indulge their throwback sonic instincts, as well as to transition seamlessly, DJ-style, between tracks. The sudden, always belated realization that the previous song has already ended and a new one begun brings on a pleasantly startled frisson, almost as one might hope about the transition between one plane of reality and another.

I wonder if The Weeknd has been panned for experimenting with a different way of presenting his music. For me, I think Jim Carrey’s commentary help make this album flow together. In some ways it reminded me of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor mixed with Oneohtrix Point Never’s  Magic Oneohtrix Point Never.

Replied to Watch London Grammar’s Ultra-Chill Cover Of The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” (stereogum.com)

The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” is a bona fide smash that’s hit #1 in dozens of countries. In the US, it’s the song that ended the very, very long #1 reign of Roddy Ricch’s “The Box.” This week, “Blinding Lights” broke a Billboard record, logging more weeks in the top five for longer than any other single in history.

First, The Naked and Famous took on The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights:

Now London Grammar put their own spin on it:

I wonder if it is the simplicity of the structure which draws people to reimagine?

Alisa Xayalith and Thom Powers from The Naked and Famous share some of their thinking here:

Listened Premature Evaluation: The Weeknd ‘After Hours’ from Stereogum

I had fun at that Diesel party. I’m having fun listening to After Hours, too. It’s a good album. It also sounds like the end of something. God only knows how the world will look in a month or two. We might not hear anything like this ever again.

I have been enjoying this album for the feel, more than the message. As Tom Breihan captures in his review:

Still, the moods explored on After Hours — anxiety, anhedonia, depression — are perfectly suited for the moment, if you can get beyond the actual situations that Tesfaye depicts in his songs. The album sounds incredible. Musically, After Hours exists within the same dark, flickering synthy post-soul territory that has always been the Weeknd’s home. But Tesfaye and his collaborators continue to find new spaces to explore within that edifice. “Too Late” plunges into the polished jitters of early-’00s UK garage. “Hardest To Live” adapts glimmering Max Martin melodies to fit the rushing pulse of car-commercial drum-‘n’-bass. A suite of songs in the middle of the album is pure coke-dusted mid-’80s yuppie club-pop, right down to the saxophone outro on “In Your Eyes.” In its kaleidoscopic, meditative majesty, the title track sounds like a blockbuster-budget Chromatics.

I am intrigued by Breihan’s point about indulgence and whether this will be the ‘end of something’:

After Hours is a sad rich guy complaining that a girl doesn’t love him anymore, pledging that he’s going to keep fucking random people and snorting random drugs until he doesn’t feel so bad. A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn’t have blinked at that. Today, as an entire world stares down a long and confusing struggle, I have a hard time summoning any empathy for the shit that Abel Tesfaye is talking about.

I guess time will tell. IN the mean time I am going to dive into the work of Oneohtrix Point Never.

Place between The Midnight and Twin Shadown