Canadian R&B singer the Weeknd pulled out of Rihanna’s European tour back in March to record more music – a move that flew in the face of contemporary pop economics. Recorded music doesn’t make much money – touring does.
A year on from Beauty Behind the Madness, his Grammy-winning, US triple-platinum pop rebirth, Starboy shows off the fruits of a solid business decision. Abel Tesfaye may play at being ambivalent about his superstar status, but his third album still has mainstream massiveness firmly in its crosshairs, with even more overt pop influences to the fore.
By now, Starboy’s electric collaboration with Daft Punk has lodged some of the Weeknd’s intentions firmly in the airwaves, and there’s another huge tune waiting in the wings – a jaw-dropper called Rockin’. Tesfaye, a formerly shadowy small-hours auteur, collaborated with glitzy super-producer Max Martin for the Weeknd’s breakout hit of 2015, Can’t Feel My Face, and Martin is back on board with this track – a rubber-coated party tune that out-synth-funks Daft Punk. Once again, Tesfaye brings his A-game Michael Jackson tics, but also takes his famed falsetto down a couple of octaves.
Tesfaye has always been musically omnivorous, sampling Siouxsie and the Banshees for House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls; Starboy’s most ardent fanboy moment, the lower-register gem Secrets, finds him working with Roland Orzabal, and sampling Tears for Fears. According to Tesfaye, the song began life as a country tune; it also quotes 80s pop bagatelle Talking In Your Sleep by the Romantics.
By this point you’re almost expecting a song called True Colors to sample Cyndi Lauper. Instead, it’s a fairly standard R&B ballad, co-produced by Benny Blanco and Cashmere Cat, in which Tesfaye attempts to claw his way towards a sensitive loverman persona. If the lengthy, 18-track Starboy has downsides, they are those puzzling tracks in which Tesfaye tries to persuade his listenership that he feels genuine emotions for girls when his entire canon attests otherwise. What sounds like a tale of death-wish in-car fellatio rings truer: “Everybody said it would hurt in the end/ But I feel nothing,” sings Tesfaye on Ordinary Life. He respects one woman, though: Lana Del Rey, who has a couple of cameos.
Much more convincing are the harder-hitting autobiographical tracks – chief among them the exceptional Sidewalks (“I ran out of tears when I was 18”), on which Kendrick Lamar lands a typically pulverising verse. Just as startling is the song’s amazing cheesewire electric guitar flurry.
The French robots return for I Feel It Coming, a sweet-natured coda to a mixed bag. It is the one track on this overlong, but unignorable album that just about manages to turn Tesfaye into yearning boyfriend material.
