★ The Weeknd ★ What You Need ★

new one is just a repeat of the last except a bit worse. same well-crafted retro production but the songs aren't too convincing overall & it doesn't have the same highlights either.

i hope Robert Beatty made a bunch of dough for this album cover

oh wait, is it the old man pic? i thought it was this: https://www.target.com/p/the-weeknd-dawn-fm-target-exclusive-cd/-/A-85668841

maybe it's both. idk...

old man pic is the main cover, that's a target exclusive cover

lol at him getting mike love's son & bruce johnston to do some totally inconsequential beach boys oohs on a track that does not resemble the beach boys at all

somehow all of this new weeknd stuff has made me get back to this 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ8yZmgKIHU

the best stuff on after hours were where he was least interested in the 80s thing and instead moved towards 90s garage rhythms so of course there's none of that here

I'm not hearing what's supposed to sound "80s" about this album.

i like that he's pushing super hard in this direction & leaving the dirtbag R&B thing behind, i just wish the production and songwriting were better. i like plenty of max martin stuff but purposefully placing him in the same context as quincy jones doesn't really do max many favors as a producer, honestly. you can't really hear any instruments breathe on this, it's all very monolithic and smushed together. sign of the times, of course, but i want to love a project like this and it leaves me a bit cold. it feels telling to me that "i feel it coming" is still his best disco-y type song & it came from daft punk in the wake of them meticulously recreating 70s studio musicianship. these weeknd records really need some of that touch. in general i still think starboy has his best songs, tho after hours is prob better front to back as an album. gonna keep trying w/ this one tho

OPN has more production credit on this than Martin, though both are involved on nearly every track. Haven't heard it yet, but if it's an album's worth of No Nightmares that's not a bad thing at all.

Shame about the cover though

I should say production and writing credit. Lopatin is listed as a writer for all but two tracks

I've listened to it twice and I don't remember any of the songs yet.

‘how do i make you love me’ is so sick

‘how do i make you love me’ is so sick

― flopson,

Agreed. The rest of the album is the usual meh.

Gasoline through Sacrifice is a really solid run imo. The rest hasn’t really stuck with me so far. Admittedly I didn’t spend time with the last album so I don’t have the comparison point.

yeah i like most of the album quite a lot, especially the “bangers”. one of my most listened to mixes last year was lopatin’s bbc essential mix which was all italo electro minimal synth and techno. at the time i thought it was a bit of a curveball for him but it makes sense that he was working on this album at the time

it’s a ymmv but i like this sound more than ‘get lucky’ era daft punk

I kinda wish he just made a wall-to-wall bangers album in the style of those songs, like a dance mix. I don't understand the point of throwing in that Quincy bit at all and it the album loses so much steam from there.

At its best ("Don't Break My Heart," a couple others) he suggests a squishier late '80s freestyle sound.

It's been underwhelming to me too - I was expecting something great based on some raves elsewhere. I tried revisiting some cuts via YouTube and it felt like the videos had more to offer than the music playing underneath.

Production is amazing in several of these, but I agree that it feels like it’s missing something. It gets to a point where it feels tiresome to listen to pastiche after pastiche. If the intent was to make this album sound like purgatory it succeeds at it.

Particularly like “gasoline” in spite of the awkward monster mash vocals in the verse.

Yeah Gasoline is a standout for me.

i'm liking this the more i listen to it. enjoying how it starts hard and clubby and unfurls into lush golden hour type tracks the more it plays out. something about it is still leaving me cold tho, can't quite put my finger on it. it's his most thematically concise album (at least of recent vintage) but i don't think it has the highs of his last few records. something like "rockin" off starboy is still >>>> to me. it's nice to play but i'm having trouble remembering individual tracks esp separating the songwriting from the production. "gasoline" is pretty awesome tho

He's sooooo addicted to "Baby Be Mine" as influence and sonic signifier.

i also really wish the interludes didn't exist. some albums i don't mind them, this one it makes me harder to remember how the album flows

the Quincy Jones grosses me out! Is he suggesting he's as crazy as Q's mama? A master like Q?

For whatever reason, the interludes don't feel all that intrusive to me. It helps that two of them are confined to the intro and outro, but even the others mostly feel like (appropriately) moody pauses in what is an otherwise sonically uniform record.

i liked this album (listened on a night drive, which seems ideal), not sure which song is my favorite but i know that the one with tyler is my least favorite

well, Tyler's declarative sentences blow away Tesfaye's repulsive fluttered moues.

yeah i mean the main reason i dislike that one in particular is that abel goes back to that played-out single-note melodic style i got sick of around the time of “low life”

album is alright, seems kind of slight which the last one did as well. it's not very memorable but listening to it doesn't make me angry either.

lol why did they get him to do a song for avatar 2 that's such a weird combo