Top 5 Takeaways from the Weeknd’s “My Dear Melancholy,”

Whether through the mysterious haze of his earlier work or his more commercially appealing tunes from recent years, the Weeknd remains one of the most compelling voices in popular music today. Almost a year and a half after the release of his most recent LP Starboy, the artist born Abel Tesfaye has re-emerged with the moody, dark mini-album My Dear Melancholy,, which dropped last Friday. Despite middling reviews for the project so far, it nonetheless racked up over 26 million streams on Apple Music in its first 24 hours, and is on track to debut at #1 the Billboard 200 album chart – which would make it his third straight album to reach the summit. Here are our five biggest impressions about the Weeknd’s newest effort.

5. It’s concise and cohesive – which Starboy wasn’t.

Clocking in at 18 songs and over an hour and eight minutes in length, his third album Starboy had some serious flashes of pop/R&B brilliance, but also a whole lot of filler at times. Perhaps this is for the sake of maximizing streaming numbers, but as Drake’s Views and Migos’ Culture II proved before and after it, bigger isn’t always necessarily better. Luckily, My Dear Melancholy, is bite-sized by comparison at only six tracks, and the record itself is a more focused effort as a singular body of work, while also being more consistent in theme, tone, and overall atmosphere.

4. Skrillex’s brostep days are long behind him… for now.

Though the project boasts production credits from hip-hop mainstays like Mike Will Made It and Frank Dukes, electro artist Gesaffelstein and Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo also tag along. That said, third track “Wasted Times” is notably co-produced by EDM titan Skrillex, and it’s far removed from the aggressive dubstep sound – sometimes referred to unfavourably as “brostep” – that brought him major success earlier in the decade. The track sounds heavily influenced by UK garage (a genre Skrillex has dabbled with in the past) and serves as a nocturnal, refreshing midway point of the project. Whether Sonny Moore returns to the sound that made him a household name anytime soon remains to be seen, but this is certainly lighter in atmosphere than we’re used to from him.

3. The lyrics are as Weeknd-ish as ever.

His style is dynamic both musically and aesthetically, and his voice is MJ-esque while still managing to be uniquely his, but it’s hard not to feel like the Weeknd’s lyrical repertoire remains limited. An artist who’s made a career out of lines that are drugged-up and sexually-charged to the nth degree, My Dear Melancholy, isn’t much of a change of pace in that respect. In fact, lyrics like “I know right now that we’re not talkin’/I hope you know this d*** is still an option,” and “‘Cause if it’s love you want again, don’t waste your time/But if you call me up, I’m f****** you on sight,” are as hedonistic and lust-drunk as much of his previous work.

2. It’s a return to the darker sound of his earlier material.

While his second and third studio albums Beauty Behind the Madness and Starboy offered a more polished pop sheen to the Weeknd’s drug-fuelled, partied-out sound and lyrics (and brought him plenty of commercial success and recognition to match), many diehards still cite his 2011 trilogy of mixtapes – House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence – as his magnum opus. My Dear Melancholy, returns to that sound in certain ways, with opening track “Call Out My Name” feeling somewhat like “The Zone” set to a waltz tempo, and both “Try Me” and “Privilege” also evoking that same kind of hazy vibe initial fans ate up seven years ago.

1. It’s a breakup album, with two very famous subjects.

During most of 2017, the Weeknd was dating fellow pop superstar Selena Gomez, with the two briefly even moving in together. However, the two split up that October, and the relationship seems to loom large over the project’s songwriting. Perhaps most chillingly, a line in “Call Out My Name” references him seemingly being willing to give Gomez a kidney transplant due to her battle with lupus (“I almost cut a piece of myself for your life.”) Prior to Gomez, he dated model Bella Hadid from early 2015 to late 2016, and the lyrics on “Wasted Times” seem like they could be him reminiscing on the time he’d spent with Gomez but wished he’d spent with Hadid (“Wasted times I spent with someone else/She wasn’t even half of you.”)