After Hours

As he evolves, he continues to reinvent himself, and he knows exactly how to leave fans hooked on havoc. And After Hours is proof that he’s not done with us yet; in fact, he’s just getting started.

“After Hours,” his rousing fourth studio album, is laden with sparkled trauma, kaleidoscopic emotional confusion, urgent and panting physical release paired with failed-state romantic dyspepsia.

After Hours is the most satisfying blend of “old” and “new” Weeknd that he’s ever put forth on a single project.

Spidery tendrils of sex-and-drugs-related dread curl around dramatic synth-pop and twinkling R&B, Yet there's also a batch of tracks that draw from bombastic, slightly tacky '80s pop - a warm, funny and wholly welcome diversion from the stylish but sterile bleakness that remains Tesfaye's calling card. [Jun 2020, p.106]

His most personal album to date.

Production-wise especially, this is The Weeknd’s strongest project yet, and deserves all the recognition.

After Hours is not exactly a new iteration but a cinematic retrospective of the entirety of the Weeknd. Its vignettes offer the purest amalgams of the earliest, bleakest alternative R&B mixtapes, like 2011's House of Balloons, to the more recent run of massive pop projects, like 2016's Starboy. Hopefully, such a retrospective lens may also cue a coming balance of his conflicting set of feelings and how he frames them.

Tesfaye fills much of this neatly sequenced, ballad-heavy set with penitence and longing. He sets the tone with an escapist fantasy that turns into a nightmarish relapse, and is tormented for much of the duration by seeking and receiving salvation and ruination from the same relationship. Some of Tesfaye's most vivid and piercing lines are herein.

The hour-long LP often plays out like an experimental 80s fever dream, but it’s still anchored by The Weeknd’s broody sonic DNA.

Even though the subjects may not be sung about with as much grit as they once were, they are certainly darker than the pop genre that's entrapped the artist in recent years.

‘After Hours’ stands as The Weeknd’s strongest record in some time.

Here songs bleed into each other, with sonic references dotted throughout to neaten up threads that previously he would have left to unravel. By balancing the two sides of his musical personality – not to mention add some levity to that boring, bad-taste id – After Hours feels like the first Weeknd album in a while to offer up a clear, singular vision rather than something frustratingly abstract.

Like Starboy, there’s a hefty Eighties influence here, although for the most part, After Hours abandons the danceability of its predecessor in favour of moody introspection. This is the music you listen to when the party’s over.

It’s hard to tell where the universe of listeners fixated on filling spiritual voids through sex, drugs, and romance ends and the universe of the Weeknd’s tortured, empty melancholy and drunken, devastating love begins. That’s the beautiful blur of After Hours.

Truly great pop is escapist, a chance to transform the otherwise mundane into something divine for a three-minute time span. Tesfaye doesn’t always get it right, but on After Hours, he offers up at least a few moments of communion during a time of isolation.

Perhaps his biggest sonic leap yet as well as his strongest and most consistent work to date. There's a cohesion to these 14 tracks that was absent from Tesfaye's last several releases, a real sense that he's closer than ever to striking the perfect balance between the darkly shaded aesthetic he broke out with and the naked pop ambitions of his more recent material.