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. Still, this is the Weeknd’s most ambitious project in sound and scope, and the most effective record he’s put out in years.
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“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. He cycles through paranoia and jealousy, only making promises when he feels threatened. 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. 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. The album works best when the Weeknd spirals out. 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. Dawn FM is a cavernous album, and the surprises on its tracks can feel like hidden crystalline chambers. The sound is decadent because it’s so discordant each song is sumptuously saturated with instrumental quirks. 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 result is a singular sound, with entropy built into the catchy dance tracks. 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. Past songs charted the course of a single tortured party or a frantic, frenetic night here, he opts for more grandeur. This architecture gives a smart cover for the Weeknd to experiment beyond the confines of his previous work. 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.
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His previous itch was for drugged-out oblivion, but Dawn FM is all about annihilation.
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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. 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. 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. And for the first time in all his dead-eyed chronicles of debauchery, he sounds a little scared about it.ĭawn FM is a concept album, sort of. 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. 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.