The Weeknd

My Dear Melancholy,

Without the bloated tracklist of Starboy, and any attempt to please an audience outside of his core, the lack of innovation doesn’t seem take away from the concise, focused, conceptual nature of this well-produced R&B gem.

The odes of addlepated excess that comprise My Dear Melancholy, serve as a soft reset of sorts, a musical palette cleanser that takes stock of what the Weeknd has accomplished thus far.

My Dear Melancholy, is slight, a skin-and-bones collection of six songs that use the fragility and grime of broken relationships as a jumping-off point for uncovering subtle textures in his sound. Recalling his 2012 series of early EPs, it evokes a drug-addled romp through Magic City on R&B Night – dark, high-def electro-soul.

It makes clear that he is one of a few contemporary artists that music cannot do without, one who manages to make headphones feel like a confessional booth with every new release.

Where Starboy was weighed down by its own importance, My Dear Melancholy, is pious and confessional, a collection of songs that feel as if they’ve been scrawled in an old journal versus blown across a billboard.

The Weeknd’s new six-song EP finds him in limbo between the bleary-eyed vibe of his early mixtapes and the bulletproof pop stylings of his last two albums.

My Dear Melancholy is a promising output but here’s hoping these stylistic ideas can be explored more originally on a full-length EP.

Abel Tesfaye’s surprise EP – the follow-up to the massively successful Starboy – features ghostly and gorgeous production but lyrics that are suffocatingly solipsistic.

The thrust of My Dear Melancholy ... which postulates that The Weeknd can in fact still pivot between Morrissey, Drake, and Prince, just doesn’t feel necessary or vital at all. It feels unproductive.

Stylistically, superficially, this forward propulsion sees him loop back to the start with six-track EP ‘My Dear Melancholy,’, which appears to sink back into the browbeaten R&B with which he made his Google-friendly name. This works – sporadically.

My Dear Melancholy, has cohesion, but it’s a listless, murky sound that never unhinges the way you want it to. Had he pushed a little further, it could have made for something more substantial, rather than walking up to the cusp and then backing down.

If this truly is a part of a whole, it's hard to imagine what about-face any new music could pull to make this EP seem like anything other than a retread of Trilogy.

My Dear Melancholy, is The Weeknd's least adventurous set of songs since Kiss Land.