The Weeknd, Jim Carrey team for Dawn FM, a weird new album ‘universe’

Starboy is beginning off the yr with a brand new universe. The Weeknd, often known as Abel Tesfaye, has introduced a brand new album known as Daybreak FM, that it’s coming Jan. 7, and that it’s packed with an uncommon forged of collaborators. There are all kinds of musical types: Quincy Jones, Lil Wayne, Oneohtrix Level By no means, and Tyler, The Creator. And there’s additionally Jim Carrey.

There’s a brand new video promo which guarantees a “new sonic universe,” as The Weeknd will get right into a automotive crash, is dragged away by cult members in robes, all of a sudden ages, seems in a membership, is approached by a cult chief, and seems confused. After which a DJ welcomes the viewer to 103.5 Daybreak FM, noting that “you’ve been at midnight means too lengthy. It’s time to stroll into the sunshine, and settle for your destiny with open arms.”

There are some hints about what the album will sound like, most notably it’s lead single “Take My Breath.” Opening with a riff that sounds slightly just like the “Fringe of Seventeen” pattern Future’s Baby used on “Bootylicious,” the monitor hits that midpoint between the traditional dance-pop produced by Quincy Jones — notably Michael Jackson’s 1987 step right into a more durable edge, Dangerous — and the at-times unworldly digital sounds of Oneohtrix Level By no means, who readers may know because the composer of Good Time and Uncut Gems.

It’s a kind of music that The Weeknd has made earlier than. He’s lined Dangerous’s “Soiled Diana,” in any case. However “Take My Breath” seems like an elevation of that sound.

The monitor’s video has a setting as fascinating as its sound. Happening at an underground rave the place everybody’s dressed of their Matrix/Blade greatest leather-based, the video exhibits individuals counting on oxygen tanks throughout their revelry, respiration into their masks. Masks have a protracted historical past at raves, however these appear to have some kind of euphoric drug in them, which works out nice for The Weeknd till a girl begins choking him along with her braid.

Getting crushed up in his music movies is nothing new for The Weeknd. In an interview with GQ from August 2021 the place he mentioned Daybreak F.M., he mentioned the common violence visited upon his personal individual in his movies is ‘me eradicating The Weeknd from Abel. I feel lots of people are like, “Oh, he’s suicidal.’ It’s not that. I feel it’s me eradicating The Weeknd from the world, however he nonetheless finds his means again.”

In that very same profile, Tesfaye performs the creator, Mark Anthony Inexperienced, a couple of tracks off the album from when it was nonetheless a piece in progress.

The music hit the studio like a Mack truck. The brand new venture is filled with occasion data. Like real-deal, illuminated-white-tiles-on-the-floor occasion data. Quincy Jones meets Giorgio Moroder meets the best-night-of-your-fucking-life occasion data. Not anachronistic disco stuff. (Not “cosplay,” as Abel put it.) That kind of retro factor is having a second proper now in pop music, however these data are new. Sweaty. Arduous. Drenched-suit, grinding-on-the-girl/boy-of-your-dreams occasion data.

“It’s the album I’ve all the time needed to make,” Abel mentioned. That assertion would linger in my mind for days. As did the music. It turned practically not possible to seek out one thing else to take heed to. The whole lot else sounded tender. Or didn’t groove sufficient. Or felt too completely happy. Or too unhappy. It was clear to me that this isn’t simply the album The Weeknd has all the time needed to make; it’s the album we’ve all the time needed him to make.

That sounds fairly promising. Nonetheless no concept what Jim Carrey goes to be doing.