The Weeknd

Starboy

Beauty Behind the Madness managed to smuggle sleaze into the mainstream by refining Tesfaye’s pop songcraft, even as it doubled down on the darkness. Starboy eases up on both fronts, recycling melodies, ideas, and even whole songs while presenting a sanitized version of the Weeknd that often lacks any real sense of perspective.

Unsure whether to cravenly embrace the kind of pop stardom that gets you on the shortlist for the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice awards or throw caution to the wind and do something more interesting artistically. Starboy hedges its bets and tries to do both. You can see why, but it makes for a curiously uneven album.

For longtime fans that believe the Weeknd is one of the major R&B artists of the decade, Starboy will ultimately seem like a disappointment.

At 18 tracks, Starboy delivers some pop gems, but its last third falters with a string of schmaltzy ballads eventually rescued by the Daft Punk-assisted closer.

Any apparent growth here ... is really just the cementing of a process begun on Kiss Land and perfected on Beauty Behind the Madness, remodeling an artistically marginal, genuinely interesting figure of musical menace into a toothless celebrity version thereof, espousing the same nihilistic themes in far cushier surroundings.

Deep into the album it becomes a slog, with too much banal, forgettable fluff like ‘Attention’, ‘Nothing Without You’ and ‘Die For You’ (this honestly goes, “I would die for you / I would lie for you”).

At 18 tracks, the album is a "contracted edition" playlist toolkit ... When pared down to its ten best songs, Starboy sounds like Tesfaye's most accomplished work.

Starboy doesn’t just double down on his signature kiss-and-tell-and-then-get-upset-about-it style, though, it tells you over and over and over again something that you’ve known and understood for years. At 18 tracks deep, that’s, well, alarming.

The Weeknd follows up last year's Beauty Behind the Madness with an album that's just as much of a roller coaster in terms of style and quality.

Long since shorn of the xx-style ‘indie R&B’ minimalism that defined those early mixtapes, Tesfaye continues to sound as if he has no idea what it is that he wants to do, while still managing to stumble over a couple of commercially-friendly songs that will keep his name amongst the movers and shakers.

Unable to elicit more than a shrug for most of its runtime, the record is just one more passable pop album in a year that really didn’t need another.