On Friday, The Weeknd will release his sixth album, Hurry Up Tomorrow. It arrives four months ahead of a film starring and co-written by the singer-songwriter based on the record. Whether the movie — described as a psychological thriller co-starring Barry Keoghan and Jenna Ortega — succeeds remains to be seen. But only a fool would bet against the album, given The Weeknd’s commercial track record.
He is simply one of the most dominant pop stars of recent years. The numbers speak for themselves: He has 25 songs with a billion or more streams on Spotify, more than any other artist ever. He has 67 gold and platinum albums and singles. And he is the first man to headline the Super Bowl halftime and appear as himself in a Safdie Brothers film. (Kevin Garnett still has a shot at the Super Bowl, I suppose.)
From a critical perspective, The Weeknd is a fascinating figure to ponder. Before he was a pop superstar, he was a mysterious indie artist with an exploding fanbase. He is easily the most successful artist to transition from the Pitchfork world to the world’s stage, and the way in which he achieved this — by both conceding to the sonic mores of mainstream pop while also remaining true to a clearly defined (and frequently transgressive) persona — has been singular and impressive.
Which is to say: I want to delve deeper into this guy’s career. So let’s do that. The hills have eyes! But I have ears! Who am I to judge? I’m the one writing this column!
Here are my 25 favorite songs by The Weeknd.
PRE-LIST ENTERTAINMENT: “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE WEEKND”
You know the meme. You have seen it at least once every Friday for the past five years. You probably have a friend who still thinks it’s a funny joke to drop in the group text thread. By now, most of you have gathered from context that Daniel Craig is standing on the stage at Saturday Night Live. And you might have even figured out that Daniel isn’t talking about “the weekend” but rather The Weeknd, also known as the Canadian singer-songwriter Abel Tesfaye.
Two other important tidbits of information tend to get overlooked, however. The first is that the song Craig is introducing is “Blinding Lights,” the first single from Tesfaye’s fourth studio LP, After Hours, set to be released 13 days after this performance. Released four months prior in November 2019, “Blinding Lights” will eventually top the charts for two weeks in early April, and for another two weeks in late April and early May. Eventually, it will reign supreme as the year’s most popular song, and then as the single biggest track of the streaming era, blowing past a staggering four billion plays on Spotify.
The second important tidbit is that the performance took place on March 7, 2020. And as we all know, that was right before the Covid shutdown. The Weeknd appeared on the premiere weekly showcase for musicians on broadcast television and sang the biggest song of his (or anyone’s) career at the last possible moment in the so-called “normal times.” (Or “relatively normal times.”) And then he proceeded to have one of the biggest albums of 2020, with After Hours spawning five singles and landing at No. 2 on the year-end sales chart (behind, of course, Taylor Swift).
The Weeknd was already popular before 2020. But 2020 represents his commercial apex. And it occurred during a year that can be credibly classified as “dystopian,” when people were either imprisoned inside of their homes or protesting in the streets against police brutality. It was a time of extreme alienation, hopelessness, and spiritual darkness. It did not make anyone feel positive about the state of the human condition.
The Weeknd’s music doing extremely well during this period does not seem like a coincidence.
25. “Loft Music” (2011)
Speaking of memes: I want all of you kids to gather around Grandpa so I can tell you a story about something called “Hipster R&B.” It was a made-up genre designation to describe artists with an affinity for pop-soul sounds from the seventies and eighties, along with the aesthetics of internet-era indie. It was applied to artists you know and love (Frank Ocean, Janelle Monae) and artists you have probably forgotten (How To Dress Well, Active Child). It emerged as a prominent sound right when critics were locked in the dreaded “Poptimists vs. Rockists” wars of the early 2010s. And “Hipster R&B” was yet another flashpoint, with pop-minded critics charging that Brooklynites in dive bars were avoiding actual R&B music on questionable “snobby anti-pop” grounds. This is what people cared about in the waning days of the first Obama term. It truly was a simpler time (derogatory).
Alas, capitalistic market forces and the culture-flattening effects of social media soon rendered such debates moot. Soon, all artists would be put in the same bucket and stratifying artists based on their relationship to the mainstream — even artists who wanted to be stratified outside of that system — became impossible. And then there was The Weeknd, the most successful artist to start out in the “Hipster R&B” lane and then transition to legitimate pop superstardom. Though it remains unclear the degree to which he came to the pop world or the pop world came to him. In the end, it was an indefinite mixture of both.
This is easy to forget now, but The Weeknd started out as an indie dude. And I mean that in the literal sense of the world — he got famous as an unsigned artist by posting his songs on YouTube and maintaining a mysterious public facing persona. Was The Weeknd a guy? Was The Weeknd a band? Was The Weeknd a front for secretly released Michael Jackson demos? For a little while at least, all those possibilities (and more) were on the table.
Now, he was always destined for bigger and (mostly) better things. In a later Rolling Stone profile, the chief executive of Republic Records recalls an L.A. area show in 2012 that attracted representatives from all the major labels, “like the Five Families all in one room.” But if you’re looking for an example of “Hipster R&B,” you couldn’t find a more on-the-nose example than “Loft Music,” from the first Weeknd mixtape, House Of Balloons. The mood is murky and cinematic. The Beach House sample is instantly recognizable. And the lyrics are seedy and escapist in the most depressing possible way, with Tesfaye relating a soulless sex-and-drugs scenario with his incongruously sweet tenor, the core formula to The Weeknd’s music. He will repeat it over and over, with progressively bigger budgets and more dazzling production, in the years ahead.
24. “Prisoner” (2015)
In 2019’s Uncut Gems, Tesfaye plays the version of himself from 2012, when he was a self-described “relentless punk.” We see him perform one of his earliest viral hits, “The Morning,” in a club before sneaking off to sniff cocaine and proposition Julia Fox in a bathroom stall. The Safdie Brothers’ attention to detail is on point. The Weeknd behaves exactly how you would imagine The Weeknd behaving at the time. But there’s also the implication that this is not real, because Tesfaye is in on the joke. The sequence plays like a self-aware extension of the decadent misadventures endlessly unspooled on his early mixtapes, and a send-up of the character that Tesfaye portrays under the umbrella of The Weeknd and repeatedly insists is a character.
Read any profile of Tesfaye, and one of the themes inevitably will concern how he is not like the songs he writes and sings. Even though his early media narrative leaned heavily on his misspent youth as a quasi-homeless Dionysian hustler set loose on the streets of Toronto. But now that he’s famous, he insists, he’s a changed man. Sometimes this is conveyed in literal terms. (“When people meet me, they say I’m really kind — contrary to a lot of my music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015.) And sometimes this is expressed via anecdotal information (like the bit in his 2021 GQ profile about how he apologized, like a good Canadian, for showing up seven minutes late to an interview).
I take Tesfaye at his word that he is not a misogynist ingesting Scarface-levels of blow on the regular. But a lot of critics don’t pay him the same courtesy. The reception to his star-crossed HBO series The Idol — and the accompanying exposé alleging skeezy behind-the-scenes behavior — suggests a media compulsion to reveal the alleged real-life scumbag behind the artistic façade.
In that way, Tesfaye is still linked with the indie artists he came up with. And I’m not talking about the other folks lumped under the “Hipster R&B” banner. I instead refer to his duet partner on “Prisoner,” Lizzie Grant aka Lana Del Rey, and Josh Tillman, whose debut as Father John Misty arrived the year after Tesfaye’s opening salvo of mixtapes eventually collected on 2012’s platinum-selling Trilogy. What these three artists shared in the early 2010s was an interest in adopting transgressive identities that subsequently confused, enraged and/or enraptured critics, who as a group tend to be way too literal-minded when it comes to reading lyrics as straight autobiography. Regular listeners, in fact, tend to be more sophisticated in that regard. (Or they just care less about the words.) In comparison to the indie artists associated with the Trump era, who were more careful to present the “correct” morals and ideologies, these elder millennials reveled in explicitly “bad” personas while also gently distancing their “real” selves from them.
I call this “The Power Of The Theoretical Asshole.” There’s a long tradition of this in popular music, just as there is in every mass market artistic medium. The rogue, the anti-hero, the difficult man (or woman) — audiences have always lapped up this sort of thing, even when they periodically make a show of condemning it. And nobody has exploited this ingrained human impulse more in music in the past decade than The Weeknd.
23. “D.D.” (2011)
I had mixed feelings about Trilogy, particularly the songs from the other two mixtapes, Thursday and Echoes Of Silence. After House Of Balloons, The Weeknd seemed woefully bereft of ideas, favoring samey-sounding, draggy ballads with ridiculously disreputable lyrics. His first proper album, 2013’s Kiss Land, was even worse, and it started to look like he might go the way of so many other “Hipster R&B” also-rans.
And then he made Beauty Behind The Madness, one of the most shameless (and best) “sellout” records of modern times. Frank Ocean would never write songs with Max Martin, and that’s why people love him. But The Weeknd absolutely would, and that’s why people love him. Beauty Behind The Madness is where he officially left “Hipster R&B” behind, and detonated the genre from the inside.
The sellout era is where I signed on as a fan. Initially my attraction to Beauty Behind The Madness was as Michael Jackson methadone. I’m a lifelong MJ fan, which has some obvious baggage I don’t want to get into lest my inbox be filled with messages from the least rational lunatics on God’s green Earth. I have found my Michael Jackson methadone from various places — the first two Justin Timberlake albums, the third Tame Impala LP, etc. But The Weeknd has been my most consistent supplier.
It’s not a perfect replication. Tesfaye’s vocals are reminiscent of MJ’s, but only his softest and least virtuosic mode. That hard, rhythmic, aggressive thing that Jackson can also lean into — see “Smooth Criminal” or the most paranoid and delusional songs from Dangerous and HIStory: Past, Present, And Future, Book 1 — eludes him. Which isn’t his fault: Michael Jackson was one of the greatest singers who ever lived, and Abel Tesfaye is not.
And then there’s the matter of genuine darkness vs. performative darkness. Abel Tesfaye is a nice guy (presumably!) playing a monster. And Michael Jackson is a monster (allegedly!) playing a nice guy. The text of The Weekend’s songs can’t touch the subtext of Michael Jackson’s songs when it comes to contemplating the blackest voids of human existence. Which is to say that The Weeknd’s cover of “Dirty Diana” doesn’t have nearly the depths of psychosexual drama that Jackson brings to the original. But it’s an essential text for understanding Tesfaye’s work regardless.
22. “Kiss Land” (2013)
I used to think this song was terrible. But now I appreciate its terribleness. When he sings “You can meet me in the room where the kisses ain’t free / you gotta pay with your bo-dy” it’s like he’s doing a “Weird” Al version of a Weeknd song.
21. “In The Night” (2015)
The most blatant MJ rip-off on Beauty Behind The Madness, even more than one of the album’s two signature songs, “Can’t Feel My Face.” According to a New York Times article, the head of Sony Music Publishing responded ecstatically to hearing “In The Night” for the first time by exclaiming, “It’s ‘Billie Jean’! It’s ‘Billie fucking Jean’!” Actually the music (or at least the rhythm) is more reminiscent of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Though the lyrics — which allude to childhood sexual abuse — do evoke that aforementioned baggage that we’re not going to get into right now.
20. “Alone Again” (2020)
Beauty Behind The Madness was The Weeknd’s commercial breakthrough, but After Hours is his pop-music masterstroke. It is the decade’s finest example of “stadium pop,” a term that Questlove once used to describe Michael Jackson’s follow-up to Thriller, 1987’s Bad, in Spike Lee’s documentary about the album. Only Tesfaye couldn’t perform the songs from After Hours in actual stadiums until more than two years after the album was released. But you get a sense of that record’s hugeness when you watch the 2023 concert film, The Weeknd: Live At SoFi Stadium, or listen to the accompanying LP, which I would argue presents the songs at least as well as the studio record. This is certainly true of “Alone Again,” which opens the album and the show, where the isolation of the lyrics is juxtaposed with the throngs of 70,000 people staring down the red-suited, masked, and Joker-ified Tesfaye. And like that, The Power Of The Theoretical Asshole has been fully harnessed.
19. “Sacrifice” (2022)
My favorite album by The Weeknd is Dawn FM, which is also the weakest selling release of his post-sellout era. Is it possible that I am, at heart, a “Hipster R&B” guy? I plead “not guilty” to those charges! But the general public certainly seemed to be bewildered by the downbeat, conceptual nature of this record. Dawn FM is a strange beast, obsessed with death and spiritual rebirth and narrated by a zombified Jim Carrey. Musical speaking, however, Dawn FM picks up where After Hours leaves off, especially the record’s thrilling first half, which unleashes one stadium pop banger after another. (Dawn FM is the rare Weeknd album that is front-loaded rather than back-loaded — he typically comes out of the gate a bit slow and then closes strong.) A highlight of that opening salvo is this roided-out disco-funk track, which is clearly cut from the Off The Wall mold.
18. “Gasoline” (2022)
Another heater from the front half of Dawn FM, only this time the reference point is icy eighties English synth pop. Tesfaye slips, hilariously, into an arch faux British accent on the verses in a manner that evokes The Human League. He also namedrops R.E.M., and pairs it with what may or may not be a reference to the third studio album by The Cure. (Coincidentally or not, he nods to “Losing My Religion” on the song “Faith,” from After Hours.) This gumbo of disparate musical allusions is another foundational element for Tesfaye, and it goes back to his childhood. “I was the kid wearing the Pink Floyd shirt and listening to Ginuwine in my ear,” he once recalled to Rolling Stone.
17. “How Do I Make You Love Me?” (2022)
(This song must be placed at No. 17, as it follows “Gasoline” on the record and the pacing of Dawn FM simply cannot be trifled with.)
16. “Party Monster” (2016)
The philosophical concerns of Dawn FM — mortality, the afterlife, the deadening effects of media and materialism, etc. — are relatively elevated for an album by The Weeknd. For the most part, the man is preoccupied by writing songs about getting wasted, hooking up with some anonymous rando, and then brooding about the experience with a mix of self-hatred and menacing swagger. There’s plenty of both in this song, which also is infused with the atmosphere of the eighties thrillers to which Tesfaye nods throughout his work. You can plainly hear the synths that evoke prime-era John Carpenter, as well as the mix of filthy-old-man eroticism and ugly violence associated with David Cronenberg. Actually, “erotic” probably isn’t the right word, as “Party Monster” isn’t remotely sexy. Tesfaye regards the sex in his songs like the average slasher-flick director thinks about the fornicating teens in his films. Sex is an activity associated with dread and ultimate destruction, not, you know, pleasure.
It goes back to The Power Of The Theoretical Asshole. There are three reasons why audiences crave this act from entertainers. 1) Bad guys are more interesting (and fun) than good guys; 2) Escapism from Judeo-Christian/common everyday decency norms; 3) Catharsis. But the allure of asshole-dom sits side-by-side with extreme guilt and shame. We must indulge, but we must also be punished.
The Weeknd understands this. In his songs, badness and punishment always arrive simultaneously. You get the “party,” but you also get stuck with the “monster.”
15. “High For This” (2011)
Tesfaye somehow rose to prominence during an era when his type of thing was openly reviled in pop culture. But he did not skate through without scrutiny. In a 2015 cover story, Rolling Stone took him to task for his habit of depicting sexual encounters in his lyrics that occur under the influence of drugs and alcohol. The magazine singled out this particular song, a defining number of his “Hipster R&B” era, for criticism. (It also focused on the far more despicable “Initiation,” in which a woman is made to sleep with the scumbag protagonist’s buddies before she can be with him.) In terms of his “problematic drug-fueled sex” songs, “High For This” is the ur-text, starting with the title. It’s more subtle that simply calling the song “I Hump On Drugs,” but just barely. But it’s also just a song, with a sick but presumably fictional premise. Pressing Tesfaye for an apology — “Everything is consent,” he awkwardly insisted to the magazine — is like guilt-tripping David Cronenberg for all of the imaginary “intercourse with TV sets” action that goes down in Videodrome. The point of “High For This” is to make you feel bad in a tuneful, catchy way, and in that respect it is an unmitigated success.
14. “House Of Balloons / Glass Table Girls” (2011)
A sister song to “Party Monster.” The synth line has the same “eighties horror movie” feel, and the lyrics likewise dwell on a “Jesse Pinkman with PTSD”-style party where people do dirty things from which they derive zero happiness. What makes this two-part track marginally more effective is that Tesfaye was closer to his own youthful “decadent party” life when he made it. And the production being somewhat less pristine actually enhances the scuzzy atmosphere. If “Party Monster” is Scream, “House Of Balloons / Glass Table Girls” is The Last House On The Left.
13. “Heartless” (2020)
During the pandemic, I decided to introduce my kids to songs about problematic, drug-fueled sex via The Highlights, the rare modern day “greatest hits” album. It’s appropriate that The Weeknd embraced his format — his catalog is tailor-made for the best-of compilation treatment. All his proper albums have the same flaw, which is having at least four or five too many songs. (He also has a strange habit of putting the best track — or even the biggest hit — at the end of the record.) But The Highlights is a perfect hits collection, and it makes a convincing case for The Weeknd being the best male pop star of the last 10 years. I have played this album on countless family trips, and it’s the music (like pre-scandal Michael Jackson) that everyone seems to agree on. Even a song like “Heartless,” which is about how The Weeknd is heartless, for all of the reasons we have already enumerated.
12. “After Hours” (2020)
It’s one of the best songs on his second-best record, so of course it’s the penultimate entry on the track list. Tesfaye has said an inspiration for the record was the 1985 Martin Scorsese film of the same name, and this song comes closest to matching that movie’s vibe of relentless, nocturnal paranoia. He’s in a waking nightmare he can’t escape; he just wants to lay next to his girl and “share babies / protection, we won’t need.” Is there a woman alive who could possibly resist that sales pitch?
11. “Starboy” (2016)
I’m joking, of course. “Share babies” is an odd rhetorical construction I have yet to wrap my head around. No matter: Like I said earlier, many songs by The Weeknd (including the great ones) have an element of dumbness. Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s not. This is not a criticism. Or, at least, it’s not a unique criticism. Every classic pop song lists “dumbness” among its primary ingredients. But sometimes The Weeknd sprinkles a little more dumbness than usual for extra flavor. “Starboy” is a classic example. “I’m a motherfucking Starboy” is a very dumb line, and it will not leave your head for at least three days after hearing it. You will, involuntarily, introduce yourself as “a motherfucking Starboy” to strangers. And those strangers will think you sound even sillier than The Weeknd when he says it. It’s just how it works.
10. “Can’t Feel My Face” (2015)
Upon the song’s release, “Starboy” scanned as an ironic commentary on the popularity of the previous record, Beauty Behind The Madness. But then, when The Weeknd headlined the Super Bowl halftime show in 2022 and opened with “Starboy,” it no longer seemed ironic. He was now, clearly, a motherfucking Starboy. “Can’t Feel My Face” followed a similarly trajectory. When it came out, the obvious cocaine reference in the title felt like a nod to old fans potentially put off by his new mainstream pop trappings. And then the song became one of the most inescapable smashes of the mid-2010s, and the druggy naughtiness was completely strip-mined out of its core. Now, “Can’t Feel My Face” seems positively wholesome by Weeknd standards.
9. “Less Than Zero” (2022)
What does relative wholesomeness do to a man who has harnessed The Power Of The Theoretical Asshole? It causes him to record a song like “Less Than Zero,” in which he approaches contrition: “I’ll always be less than zero / You tried your best with me, I know.” Naturally, he does this under the guise of a Bret Easton Ellis reference, just to let you know that the “theoretically asshole”-ness of it all hasn’t been fully abandoned. Meanwhile, the specter of “Hipster R&B” also lurks — if this song wasn’t at least partly influenced by A Deeper Understanding I’ll never write another word about The War On Drugs again.
8. “In Your Eyes” (2020)
We are entering the heart of The Highlights territory here. “I just pretend / that I’m in the dark,” he sings at the start of this song, and it feels like a confession. The big hits from After Hours strike a balance between deepening The Weeknd’s inter-album mythos — the man definitely has a weakness for grouping records into trilogies — and operating as pure candy-cotton pop songs.
7. “Save Your Tears” (2020)
Like this song, for instance, one of Tesfaye’s sweetest confections. Though he does manage to smuggle some bile inside that indelible eighties pop music beamed from the shiniest roller rink in the sky. He spies a former love on the dance floor and feels a tinge of bitterness when he sees her having fun. But then she spots him, with a theatrical “single teardrop falling” from her eye, and he relishes her still-broken heart. He claims to want her back but you don’t believe him. Because this is bubblegum pop laced with strychnine, like a Wham! song written by This Year’s Model era Elvis Costello.
6. “The Morning” (2011)
Tesfaye once described his childhood, with questionable sensitivity, as “Kids without the AIDS.” That’s the vibe of this song. Yes, there are some lyrical clunkers. (“Girls get timid / but behind closed doors they get poles so rigid.” Groan.) But there’s a reason why Tesfaye got people’s attention with relative quickness and then built an all-time pop career. He transformed amoral grime into riveting, seductive listens.
5. “What You Need” (2011)
Oh, and he also had a ton of promotional help from Drake. Can’t forget that! Though Drake, in the long run, (allegedly!) took more than his share from The Weeknd in return. Just how much Tesfaye contributed to Drake’s best album, 2011’s Take Care, has been disputed. Tesfaye claims Drake plundered nearly half of House Of Balloons, while Drake has denied that claim. But the evidence that Drake jacked The Weeknd’s vibe is plainly discernible in this song, which sounds like the blueprint for Drake’s sad-guy horn-dog act during the rest of the 2010s.
4. “Take My Breath” (2022)
The first 85 seconds of this song are about as awesome as stadium pop gets. (The Live At SoFi Stadium version is even better, because you can hear the audience lose their minds.)
3. “Blinding Lights” (2020)
‘‘These kids, you know, they don’t have a Michael Jackson. They don’t have a Prince. They don’t have a Whitney. Who else is there? Who else can really do it at this point?’’ Abel Tesfaye said that 10 years ago. I admire the metric ton of chutzpah required to make such a bold declaration publicly. And I appreciate that he was actually able to realize his stadium-pop ambitions, with this song being his greatest achievement. It’s one thing to emulate Michael Jackson, but to create a song to approaches his level of ubiquity must be saluted in these famously fractured and hero (or anti-hero) deficient times. Even if “Blinding Lights” sucked I would have to put it in the top three. But, thankfully, it does the opposite of suck.
2. “I Feel It Coming” (2016)
Daft Punk’s unexpected role as the Quincy Jones of the 2010s truly reached its apotheosis here, my kids’ favorite track by The Weeknd. It sounds so sweet that the kiddies never notice the line about “the heat between your legs” in the minivan. (If they have noticed they haven’t told me, which is just as well.) It helps that this is the rare Weeknd sex song where both involved parties appear to be mostly sober, at least in the first verse. But this is a song I never tire of hearing. It’s like “Get Lucky” if I weren’t sick to death of “Get Lucky.”
1. “The Hills” (2015)
Is there a more quintessential lyric by The Weekend than “when I’m fucked up that’s the real me”? It’s not the real Abel Tesfaye, but it’s definitely the purest manifestation of his creative Id. Out of all these songs, none has more “theoretical asshole” energy than “’The Hills.” And none sound quite as enormous as this song. “The Hills” is “Hipster R&B” blown up by a factor of 100 million, which is also the number of records that Michael Jackson wanted Bad to sell. He didn’t get there, nor will anyone else. But The Weeknd did perform “The Hills” at the Super Bowl, which seems like some kind of accomplishment, particularly if you like the idea of 120 million people having a communal moment over a song about (surprise!) loveless sex in the Hollywood Hills. Given that America feels (emotionally speaking) ensconced in its own “loveless sex” era, blindly chasing short-term thrills in lieu of lasting sustenance, “The Hills” is exactly the national anthem we want and deserve.
