Not every movie is Oscar-worthy, but that doesn't mean the audience didn't have a good time.
The Weeknd is one of the most enigmatic artists in all of music.
For most of his career, being an enigma has been The Weeknd's entire image, evidenced by his lack of interviews or lack of public speaking in general.
Go ahead, try to think about what The Weeknd's voice sounds like when he's not singing. Take your time, this review isn't going anywhere.
Unless you're one of the half-million people to watch his 2016 Zane Lowe interview or you really honed in on his two lines during Uncut Gems, you have no clue what one of the biggest names in R&B even talks like.
All signs point to The Weeknd not liking to speak, but signs do point to him loving to be seen. More precisely, he loves his ideas to be seen.
That love is shown throughout After Hours, as it seems The Weeknd took the album's visuals just as serious as the music. From dropping three music videos before the album even released to borrowing Tyler the Creator's suit/alter ego idea, The Weeknd treated his first album since 2016 like a movie.
I hate Starboy.
It was an overly-pop album that sounded like an artist abandoning his sound for sales. But on the last episode of UNHEARD, one of my co-hosts made a great point that I was too blinded by hate to see.
"After Hours makes me appreciate Starboy more because without Starboy we don't get this album," explained Vance.
Vance's take made me revisit Starboy with the lens of it being an album that failed to develop a sound rather than an album that was made for the sake of doing popstar numbers. It's hard to hate an album for trying something new, especially when the next album gets that new thing right.
Almost identical to Starboy, After Hours focuses on one main character, has a strong association with nightlife and is heavy on the visual side of the story. According to the short film M A N I A, Starboy is supposed to follow The Weeknd around an eventful night filled with highs and lows. Keywords: "supposed to".
Starboy fell flat in drawing the correlation between the songs, causing the album to fall flat thematically.
After Hours does the complete opposite. It's clear The Weeknd cared about the cohesion of this album more than any project outside of his early mixtapes.
The album mainly sticks to five producers: Max Martin, Oscar Holter, DaHeala, Illangelo and Metro Boomin.
Those five producers each team up, usually two or three songs at a time, to create unique sounds, but thanks to the album's arrangement, the uniqueness can be lost on listeners. So every time someone says "all the songs sound the same" on a project that features trap, '80s, Jazz, and stripped R&B elements, they're basically giving the album one of the best compliments possible.
That tracklist helps push the movie-feel even more, as each song feels like a different scene in this story The Weeknd is trying to tell.
If the tracks are the scenes, then the lyrics at the end of songs are the transition. For example, The Weeknd uses the bridge of "Snowchild" to melodically announce he's leaving Los Angles, only for the next song to be "Escape From LA".
He uses this same bridge tactic to set the mood for "Blinding Lights" through the lyrics "I ended up in the back of a flashing car" at the end of "Faith". A once-forgettable, bubblegum single was turned into a more fitting, darker single through one line at the end of the previous song.
The Weeknd does a great job of creating a cohesive experience with After Hours while incorporating a sound for everyone. This is usually where a "but this is what I hate" comes in, but there's nothing worth genuine critique on After Hours.
The theme The Weeknd chooses isn't an entirely new one like Tyler the Creator's IGOR was last year, so the story experience isn't as gripping as some of the top cinematic-feeling projects of the past. And the fact that The Weeknd basically told the audience the entire plot in the trailer(My Dear Melancholy) doesn't help with engagement much either.
With that being said, is it really fair to hold After Hours to the same standard as IGOR just because they both feature main characters that always wear a colorful suit with sunglasses? Or because they both follow a movie-like structure? Or are they comparable because they both give a deep look into a major issue of the artist's life?
I won't compare them, but I will leave this information here. When reviewed last year, IGOR received a score of "Jordan Peele's Get Out/10".
Final Score: Jordan Peele's US/10
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