The Weeknd delivers 2022’s first great album, ‘Dawn FM’
It says a lot about the Weeknd that his sunniest album – the one he’s framed as a kind of light at the end (???) of our long pandemic tunnel – contains not one but two songs about erotic asphyxiation.
The first you know: “Take My Breath,” which dropped last summer as an advance single from the Canadian pop-soul auteur’s brand-new
“Dawn FM” even as his previous LP’s smash “Blinding Lights” was still stubbornly installed on the Hot 100.
The second is “Gasoline,” a sleek robo-funk jam that properly opens “Dawn FM” after an introduction featuring the actor Jim Carrey as a claptrapping radio DJ telling his listeners they’ve “been in the dark for way too long.”
“I wrap my hands around your neck,” the Weeknd sings, as percussive synth riffs ricochet off his high, imploring voice, “You love it when I always squeeze.”
In the past, these references to risky sexual gratification would’ve played as part of the Weeknd’s long-running bad-boy act – the devotion to extreme behavior (and the disgust with bourgeois stability) that’s driven his music since he emerged more than a decade ago with a series of shadowy internet mixtapes.
But on “Dawn FM” the rough sex carries a softer edge; here, in exquisitely rendered tunes lush with echoes of Michael Jackson and Depeche Mode, he’s illuminating a path to fulfillment, perhaps even to happiness, and crucially without renouncing his old predilections.
He’s got much, of course, to be glad about: In a realization of the superstar potential he began exploring when he hooked up with the hitmaking producer Max Martin in 2015, the Weeknd’s 2020 “After Hours” album went double-platinum and led to a performance at last year’s Super Bowl halftime show. And though the record was infamously snubbed by the Grammy Awards, the Weeknd arguably won a very public battle with the Recording Academy, which recently overhauled its controversial nomination process not because of the Weeknd, it claims, but definitely not not because of him.
He vividly recounts his latest successes in one of the highlights of “Dawn FM,” “Here We Go… Again,” in which he brags about earning “a quarterbil’ on an off-year” and making an unnamed movie-star girlfriend “scream like Neve Campbell.”
Yet in the Weeknd’s telling, this album is as much about manifesting contentment as about reflecting it. In a recent Zoom session with journalists, the 31-year-old singer, born Abel Tesfaye, said he started writing “Dawn FM” after setting aside a gloomier project he decided was too “emotionally detrimental” to continue to work on.
“Dawn FM,” which follows through on that prologue with occasional