On “Escape From LA,” The Weeknd lays out these sentiments clearly, singing, “Well this place is never what it seems / Take me out LA / Take me out of LA / This place will be the end of me.” Following the beat switch, he sings longingly about sex in the studio, presumed by many to be about his ex-girlfriend Bella Hadid. On “After Hours,” The Weeknd sings of the same things he always has – women, sex, drugs, the city – but something has changed he’s becoming tired of it. The Weeknd sings about his rise from obscurity, from Toronto to Los Angeles and about drugs, homelessness, women and luxury cars.“And I had nothing to believe in/ Double cup leanin’/ Couldn’t even breathe and / For that money I was fiending / Cali was the mission but now a n- leaving,” he sings, in high juxtaposition with his goals from “The Morning” off his first mixtape: “Order plane tickets / Cali is the mission / Visit every month like I’m split life living.”
On the fifth track, “Snowchild,” the production takes a retreat from the showmanship and is stripped down to a simple beat with a few keys. “Scared to Live” is a ballad, an apology to a past lover for ruining her perception of love, interpolating Elton John’s “Your Song.” “Hardest to Love” is a soft electronica reminiscence of The Weeknd’s failed relationships. “Too Late” continues this theme, a fast-paced melodic hook that elicits a head bob at the very least. The beat switch in the first track “Alone Again” transitions listeners smoothly from synthesizer croons and echoes 80s glory: autotuned, deep percussion, high keys and synths. Weighing in at 14 tracks and 56 total minutes, “After Hours” is a mixture of 80s dance pop and The Weeknd’s individual dark R&B style that he has been curating since his first mixtape. “Blinding Lights”, the second single, just recently hit number one a feat that was accompanied on the charts by every other song on the album. It premiered on The Weeknd’s Beats 1 radio show Memento Mori. “Heartless,” the first single released from “After Hours,” hit number one on the charts back in December. The album quickly became his fourth number one album. The day before “After Hours” was released, The Weeknd announced via Twitter that the album would be dedicated to Lance, known by username XOPODCAST, a longtime fan who had died the previous night. Luckily, on March 20, The Weeknd released his fourth studio album “After Hours.” Given everything that is going on in the world right now, it can be very difficult to find fun and joy. Yet that didn’t stop his team from sending out a press release Friday saying that, 12 minutes after it dropped, “Highlights” became “the most streamed album in history on Spotify.” (That’s because the existing streams for each song, including several with more than a billion each, instantly accrued to the compilation.By Madison Cushing, Collegian Correspondent So why the attempt to keep this thing from being called what it clearly is? Perhaps the Weeknd - an old-school album guy who’s spent the last year and change promoting 2020’s “After Hours” in costume - thinks the openly commercial format cheapens his songs. Issued just a couple of days before he’ll headline the halftime show at Sunday’s Super Bowl LV, the close-to-comprehensive “Highlights” does what all best-of collections do: rounds up an act’s most well-known material so that anyone made curious about him - by, say, a performance on music’s most-watched stage - can quickly get up to speed. The Weeknd says his new compilation, “The Highlights,” is not a greatest-hits set, but the only reason anyone should take that claim seriously is because the album doesn’t include his ecstatic 2015 single “In the Night.”