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On the smooth ‘Here We Go… Again’, Tesfaye reflects on his trajectory from enigmatic Toronto newcomer to Super Bowl half-time show conqueror. “ I don’t want to be responsible for your heart if we fall / ‘Cause I’ll get clumsy and tear it apart,” he admits. On ‘Best Friends’, driven by big, dark, staccato bass stabs, he laments a pal wanting to exit their friends-with-benefits arrangement, acknowledging their feelings while being honest about his own. Working on yourself isn’t a linear process, though, and old habits die hard. Instead of putting up a front, he’s reconciled with the fact that he can’t force her to stay. It’s an immediate show of taking responsibility and a mature new approach that sets up a thrilling 52 minutes that tussle with reflection, growth and the power of hindsight.įor many of us, the last couple of years have been a time of self-improvement and Tesfaye confirms he’s in that club, too, with the twinkling, dreamy ‘80s R&B swing of ‘Out Of Time’: “ I’ve been so cold to the ones who loved me, baby / I look back now and I realise.” The track shows how much headway he’s made in grappling with his old ways, as he accepts that there might be someone better for his partner than him. “ This part I do alone… I’ll take my lead on this road,” he sings in the album’s opening lines, before Carrey offers us encouragement to “ walk into the light and accept your fate with open arms”. But there’s a sense that the shadows are receding as the Canadian megastar takes a refreshing new look at his life, reckons with his past mistakes and attempts to become a better person. With that project scrapped, he moved on to something new, stepping into the first hints of sunrise with ‘Dawn FM’.ĭarkness still abounds on his brilliant fifth album, which is conceptually anchored around a fictional radio station (103.5 Dawn FM) hosted by comedian Jim Carrey, Tesfaye’s neighbour and apparent fellow telescope enthusiast. After releasing his much-lauded 2020 album ‘After Hours’, Abel Tesfaye began work on its follow-up, a gloomy collection he considered too “emotionally detrimental” for a world still under the shadow of the pandemic. “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” goes the old cliché and, in The Weeknd’s case, that appears to be true.