Abel Tesfaye’s luridly spectacular album continued his trangressive and dazzlingly deranged themes with gorgeous, grand music voiced by his depressive alter ego
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Dawn FM is the Dom Pérignon of male manipulator music – a slick of negging and neediness, sleaze and sanctimony that carries the unnatural, alluring glow of toxic waste. Released without fanfare in the first week of the year and still as luridly spectacular 11 months later, the Weeknd’s fifth album – eighth if you count his superlative and still-astounding 2011 mixtape trilogy – is also his most dazzlingly deranged, and a high watermark for any star seeking to inflict their own vision on mainstream, stadium-primed pop music.
Dawn FM serves as the midway point in a trilogy of concept albums that began with 2020’s After Hours, and which will supposedly end with an album about the afterlife. But it also feels like a direct reaction to After Hours’ success. That record allowed Abel Tesfaye to showcase some of his most nakedly transgressive art for increasingly huge audiences. In its music videos, he depicted himself battered and bruised, his teeth caked with blood; he attended awards ceremonies in full facial bandages and occasionally appeared in caricaturish prosthetics. The aesthetic leaned obscurist, drawing liberally from the relatively obscure 80s Scorsese comedy After Hours and the suffocating atmospherics of cult synth-pop band Chromatics.