It helps that the self-awareness he's flashed in his interviews has begun creeping slowly into his music. But for newcomers, there's a whole world to explore, and on Beauty Behind the Madness it's richer and smarter than ever. You really have to buy into his bad-guy persona, and after four years of this stuff, you might roll your eyes at a chorus like "I only call you when it's half past five"- we get it. In the end, enjoying the Weeknd requires a certain suspension of disbelief, and that remains true on Beauty Behind the Madness. Thankfully, he has toned it down somewhat -we're miles away from that time he killed a woman in a music video and let the camera pan over her bloodied body. Sometimes he's underhanded, like on "As You Are", which is one long neg disguised as a tender love song, and other times it's skin-crawlingly direct. "Acquainted" and the mind-numbingly boring Ed Sheeran collaboration "Dark Times" feel like they were written with Mad Libs, and elsewhere, Tesfaye's cruelly misogynist perspective remains jarring and uncomfortable. Tesfaye repeats the tired tropes he's been squeezing the life out of since the beginning (take a shot for every time he offers a variation on "love is pointless"). But he's still a victim of his own flawed persona. In moments like this, when Tesfaye harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with. And then there's "In the Night", a MJ-esque disco stomper and guaranteed hit single that sounds like nothing he's done before. "Shameless" is "Wicked Games" from a more knowing perspective, while "Angel" wraps the Weeknd's most epic moments-think "Heaven or Las Vegas"-in a glossy adult-contemporary framework that could house a Celine Dion song (and written with one of her collaborators, Stephen Moccio). "Tell Your Friends" is like "The Morning" produced by Kanye West. "The Hills", with its disaffected croak and horror-movie screams, sounds like a song from the Thursday mixtape on a Hollywood budget. The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them.
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Developed from a childhood spent listening to Ethiopian music, his labyrinthine hooks and ad-libs are more indelible than ever. Everything we know about the Weeknd is here: the dark, mysterious production where contemporary R&B rubs elbows with post-punk and shoegaze (Tesfaye's OG producer, Illangelo, is everywhere on it) the lascivious lyrics that swing between menacing and laughable and, most of all, Tesfaye's sinuous vocal melodies. But instead of going the "Can't Feel My Face" route, opening up his sound and softening its edges, he returns to what made him great in the first place.
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With that momentum behind him, Beauty Behind the Madness sees Tesfaye hell-bent on stardom, shedding the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. Then there was "Earned It", the theme song for 50 Shades of Grey which introduced him to a whole new audience and put his angelic voice over orchestral pomp-a formula that proved hard to resist, even if the song was kind of icky. Tesfaye scrapped what writers provided him with and tried his hand at something radio-friendly, and the result was his most likeable verse since the hallowed days of the Trilogy.
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Tesfaye's pivot from cult lothario to pop star began last year with a guest verse on Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder".