Dawn FM

We might have noticed that there was something universally, perversely relatable about the Weeknd’s music when songs from his 2015 album appeared on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack and were nominated for a Kids’ Choice Award. To think that Abel Tesfaye—who rose to fame somewhat anonymously with sweaty mixtures about Alizé for breakfast and pills that burned his brain—would one day go on to play the Super Bowl would have felt bizarre to even his fans. But after a long album rollout for 2020’s After Hours wherein the singer had his face made up with bruises, blood, and bandages, there he was on the most-watched telecast of 2021—92 million people tuning in—looking like a quarter-billion bucks. A decade after his initial rise to fame, he had ascended to true Starboy status, glistening in a red sequin suit, performing hit after hit from his catalog, pop’s antihero taking his rightful place on the throne.

After Hours was a dancefloor record released when every dancefloor was under lockdown, an attempt to bridge the gap between a despondent persona and Billboard-charting retro-funk, flirting with both impulses without committing to either. On Dawn FM, released with essentially no fanfare, the Weeknd has gone all-in on a biblical fantasia, melding frisson and fear into euphoric disco and ’80s R&B with life and death stakes. And for the first time in all his dead-eyed chronicles of debauchery, he sounds a little scared about it.

Dawn FM is a concept album, sort of. In interviews, Tesfaye has said that the album plays like listening to a kind of adult contemporary radio station as you sit in a traffic jam in the tunnel, only the tunnel is purgatory and the light at the end of the tunnel is death. For the most part, Tesfaye earns this framework—he doesn’t toss out half–baked theories on the meaning of life as much as he prods at the looming dread and terror inherent to it. He filled his early-career songs with metaphorical self-destruction; on “Gasoline,” he sings about setting himself on fire: “It’s 5 a.m./I’m nihilist/I know there’s nothing after this,” he drones in a disarming British accent, bluntly summarizing his entire discography. His previous itch was for drugged-out oblivion, but Dawn FM is all about annihilation. Interspersed with his real-life neighbor Jim Carrey playing a blissed-out radio DJ and parody commercials for the afterlife, Dawn FM takes the Weeknd on a literal death drive.

This architecture gives a smart cover for the Weeknd to experiment beyond the confines of his previous work. Past songs charted the course of a single tortured party or a frantic, frenetic night; here, he opts for more grandeur. He executive produced the album alongside pop powerhouse Max Martin and experimental electronic musician Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, and the two function like a devil and angel perched on his shoulders—Martin’s glittering effects, Lopatin’s abstractions and absurdity—alongside production from Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia, and longtime collaborator Oscar Holter.

The result is a singular sound, with entropy built into the catchy dance tracks. You can hear it in the panoramic bleats on “How Do I Make You Love Me,” the buzz and haze of “Every Angel Is Terrifying,” the electronic squiggles on “Don’t Break My Heart,” before the Weeknd deadpans a line like, “I almost died in the discothèque.” Even the songs that sound the most like classic Weeknd fare—the blasé throb of “Best Friends,” the rap-adjacent cadence that starts “Here We Go….Again”—are flecked with screeching strings and squirming synths. The sound is decadent because it’s so discordant; each song is sumptuously saturated with instrumental quirks. Dawn FM is a cavernous album, and the surprises on its tracks can feel like hidden crystalline chambers. A sample from a 1983 Japanese city pop song slips into a shimmery ballad; a Beach Boys member coos background vocals while Tyler, the Creator howls, “You gon’ sign this prenup,” four times in a row.

The album works best when the Weeknd spirals out. The five-minute version of “Take My Breath” stretches out into a shimmering struggle—you can hear him fight for air, his gasps reverberating over the striding beat. He negotiates boundaries with a lover on “Sacrifice,” alternating between devotion and defiance; “When you cry and say you miss me, I lie and tell you that I’ll never leave,” he hisses, but he admits the extent to which he’s already compromised. He cycles through paranoia and jealousy, only making promises when he feels threatened. “The only thing I understand is zero-sum of tenderness,” he hums early in the album, and for much of the record he flails between articulating that cynicism towards romance and defeating it, like on the treacly “Starry Eyes.” It’s a ballad primed for catharsis, but it builds toward a limp conclusion: “Let me be there for your heart,” he wails, a syrupy pledge that seems to come out of nowhere and oversimplifies the toll it takes on him.

Still, this is the Weeknd’s most ambitious project in sound and scope, and the most effective record he’s put out in years. Part of the thrill comes from hearing him take himself a little less seriously, like the wink in his voice as he sings station identification bumpers in requisite jazzy harmony. There’s also all the little grace notes throughout: Quincy Jones detailing how childhood trauma ravaged his adult relationships; Tesfaye reciting a stanza from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies,” murmuring that “Beauty is the terror we endure.” This, too, could be a thesis statement for the Weeknd’s work—the horror built into compulsion, the fear that anything worth having will corrode. But it’s the pursuit of beauty that enchants this album, the search for the sublime, the will to turn a grid-locked crawl towards death into something incandescent. “You gotta be heaven to see heaven,” Jim Carrey muses on the album’s final track, a winding spoken-word poem that unfolds like a prayer. It’s a lovely thought, an instruction and a plea—to abandon regret, to hollow out shame, to cobble bliss out of the chaos, for as long as we’re able.

CORRECTION: The Weeknd narrates the passage from Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” on “Every Angel Is Terrifying”; director Josh Safdie voices the Arthur Fleminger character.

The Weeknd: Dawn FM

$43 at Rough Trade

$33 at Amazon

$40 at Target

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