The other big star that lurks on the album is Lana Del Rey, who crops up on Party Monster and Stargirl Interlude, and whose work Tesfaye has claimed great kinship with. There’s a real sense of invention about A Lonely Night’s warped take on 80s boogie, with its staccato bassline distorted until it sounds less funky than unsettling, or Sidewalks, which might be the best thing here, with its scattershot drums, squeals of electric guitar and a typically scene-stealing, warp-speed guest appearance from Kendrick Lamar. Starboy is audibly at its best – and certainly at its most original – when least gimlet-eyed. Such pop-house comes in varying degrees of flimsiness: at one extreme, there’s Rockin’, which offers absolutely nothing to distinguish it from all the other cookie-cutter pop-house on Radio One at the other there’s Secrets, which hardly tears up the blueprint but at least comes equipped with a fantastic chorus and a walloping sample from Tears for Fears’ Pale Shelter. Ironically, given that the exact contribution made by guest stars Daft Punk to the album’s first single and title track was a bit hard to discern (their presence is a lot easier to make out on I Feel It Coming, the album’s closing homage to Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson), chunks of Starboy seems to operate under the influence of their earlier work: pop-house big on the filtered synths and the sidechain-compressed drums found on the French duo’s debut album, Homework. Instead, there are further contributions to the global oversupply of Auto-Tune heavy ballads, some of which are genuinely interesting – the crawl-paced All I Know, furnished with a bassline that keeps unpredictably sliding out of tune the haunting lo-fi keyboard line that weaves around Reminder – and some of which aren’t.Įlsewhere, there is Max Martin-assisted pop completely divested of the creepy 5am curtains-drawn-against-the-dawn darkness that was once the Weeknd’s USP (Love to Lay). Starboy is no equivalent of Beyoncé’s venture into country or the opaque tame poem abstractions of Frank Ocean’s twin releases. There’s not really anything here to make your head turn in surprise, unless you count the fact that he choses to scream rather than sing the chorus of False Alarm. While most of 2016’s big R&B and hip-hop albums – from Lemonade to The Life of Pablo, Coloring Book to Blond – have seen his peers broaden out their musical palette, draw in new influences and take artistic risks, confident they can pull their audience along with them, the Weeknd seems to have decided this is the moment to go for the mainstream pop jugular. Still, judging by the contents of Starboy, the artist formerly known as Abél Tesfaye can’t find the fame – so all-encompassing it takes in pre-pubescent fans – that discombobulating. It is doubtless a strange sensation to realise that an audience of pre-pubescent Nickelodeon-watchers love your song about the numbing effects of cocaine.
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