Purgatory and Jim Carrey: this is what the first great album of 2022, 'Dawn FM', by the Weeknd sounds like

The Weeknd, on May 23 at the Billboard Music Awards ceremony in Los Angeles.Chris Polk / NBC (NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

If The Weeknd was missing something to be a true pop star, here it is: releasing an album by surprise, without resorting to those tedious months of dripping songs that most contemporary musicians style.

And it has done so in an atypical time, the first week of January, when we still have the cloying taste of polvorón on our palate.

The 31-year-old Canadian musician (real name Abel Tesfaye) announced last Monday that the publication of his fifth album

the continuation of the successful

(2020), would be on January 7.

And here is

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It all starts with an

unexpected

, the histrionic actor (also Canadian) Jim Carrey, who announces in the album's intro: “You're listening to 103.5 Dawn FM. You've been in the dark too long. It is time to walk into the light and accept your destiny with open arms. Are you afraid? Do not worry. We are here to hold your hand and guide you through this painless journey. Don't be in a hurry. Just relax and enjoy an hour of music. " This presentation summarizes the concept of the album: a kind of purgatory where it keeps us alive, proposed as an escape zone. In a pre-release encounter, the singer compared it to "someone stuck in a big traffic jam." Little original, but perhaps illustrative.

This storyline is specified in a 51-minute radio transmission, without interruptions, with

and some jokes. Nor is it a rabidly novel idea (The Who already did it in 1967 with

but the formula works for the Canadian and does not distort the listening of the album. It is also a commitment to the concept of a long-playing album as opposed to a time where only songs are demanded and, if possible, brief ones. Other stars like Adele have also positioned themselves in that line. The British woman managed to cancel Spotify's random listening option so that her latest album,

could be enjoyed in the order in which she conceived it. In addition, it produced 500,000 copies in vinyl format.

A treated image of The Weeknd aged for the cover of his new album, 'Dawn FM'.

Dawn FM

is a work with phases of a lot of dance, some driven by the eighties keyboards that already exploded in their 2020 smash hit,

Songs like

or

sound like Human League, Depeche Mode or Ultravox. It also includes the disc half times and ballads, such as

or

. In both the influence of Michael Jackson is clearly appreciated. Musically, it is a more luminous work than previous ones, where the singer went through dark sounds. Some

however, affect their emotional traumas. It is no coincidence that the historic Quincy Jones (producer of

by Michael Jackson, so you know where the shots are going) participate with a real account of how the veteran musician and producer was affected in his relationships as a couple growing up without parents. The title of the song is

and appears in the middle of the disc, to introduce the thematic pieces on the emotional turmoil. Everything follows a tale in an album where he has surrounded himself with two infallible producers, Oneohtrix Point Never and the Swedish dance magician Max Martin. Aside from recited appearances by Jim Carrey and Quincy Jones, rappers Tyler The Creator and Lil Wayne also make cameos.

To understand The Weeknd's music, it should be emphasized that we are dealing with an artist with a powerful story to sell. The only child of an Ethiopian couple who fled the terror of the military junta that took over the African country in the late 1970s, he was born in a suburb of Toronto (Canada). His father abandoned them when he was two years old and spent his childhood glued to television while his mother completed a day with two jobs. At 17 he dropped out of school and went to live with a friend. They both liked ecstasy very much. They stole to buy it and got caught. They spent a few nights in jail… “All I wanted was to make music, I wanted to be able to move millions of people with my songs and yet there it was,at the door of the store thinking about how to steal some money so I can buy ecstasy and oxycodone to help me get through the day. What else could I do ", he revealed to

The Weeknd Sound

He did something else: he took advantage of these stormy experiences to build The Weeknd sound: hedonism, darkness, strangled rhythms.

Since his beginnings, 10 years ago, the Canadian has managed to unite the prevailing styles

electronic, R&B) with his classical influences.

Lenny Kravitz's pastiche with rock at the end of the eighties is being done by him with dance music.

All with a careful aesthetic, inspired by his great love of cinema: Martin Scorsese, American

and Korean violence and horror films.

In his videos he condenses all that.

Dawn FM

closes as it began, with a Jim Carrey monologue on

.

The actor reveals the purpose of this science fiction tale produced by The Weeknd: “God knows that life is chaos.

But he did one fundamental thing.

First you have to relax your mind and arrange your soul to align itself.

And dance until you find that divine movement.

In other words: you have to be the sky to be able to see the sky.

May peace be with you ”.

And if you don't see it, there is a consolation: the music that plays in The Weeknd's purgatory makes the wait very bearable.