Beauty Behind the Madness
| The Weekend
Beauty Behind the Madness
Beauty Behind the Madness is the second studio album by Canadian singer The Weeknd. It was released on August 28, 2015, by XO and Republic Records. The album features guest appearances from Labrinth, Ed Sheeran and Lana Del Rey, with production handled by The Weeknd himself, Stephan Moccio, DaHeala, Illangelo, Ben Billions, DannyBoyStyles, Max Martin and Ali Payami, among others. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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Pitchfork
On Beauty Behind the Madness, Abel Tesfaye sheds the fat from his disappointing major label debut, Kiss Land. The album plays like a victory lap, with Tesfaye revisiting past glories and embellishing them, and when he harnesses his gift, the results are impossible to argue with.
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Rolling Stone
Abel Tesfaye — the mysterious pop innovator who records as the Weeknd — set a weird new standard for gloomy self-indulgence in R&B when he came out of Canada a few years back. He was like Drake with the soul of an art-school goth, singing vaguely creepy things like “It’s gonna end how you expected/Girl, you’re such a masochist” in a satin-smooth voice over weeded-out, black-light-ready tracks built from stretched-out Siouxsie and the Banshees and Beach House samples. The three mixtapes he self-released in 2011 (collected one year later as his full-length Trilogy) and his proper major-label debut, 2013’s Kiss Land, all seemed suspended in a predawn haze, where partying gets dark and drugs feel more like quicksand than rocket fuel. It’s no surprise that this year, when he finally scored a chart-topping summer jam, it was a thinly veiled sex-as-cocaine metaphor called “Can’t Feel My Face.” The dude specializes in sensual numbness.
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The Guardian
Kiss Land’s follow-up, Beauty Behind the Madness, has seen the Drake associate embark on a bewildering charm offensive, like a politician dandling babies. There was Earned It, the waltz he contributed to the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, a genre curveball that nevertheless sat comfortably with the Weeknd’s depraved brand identity, cultivated over three mixtapes (repackaged as 2012’s Trilogy). Then came the inspired meeting of pop matter and anti-matter, Love Me Harder, a duet between Tesfaye – a crooner who sings about meaningless sex on drugs – and fresh-faced ingenue Ariana Grande.
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NME
In the past year Abel Tesfaye, who began releasing mixtapes of murky R&B as The Weeknd in 2011, has pulled off a number of prime pop coups. First came a collaboration with American megastar Ariana Grande (‘Love Me Harder’), then there was a Top Five hit with ‘Earned It’, written for Fifty Shades Of Grey, 2015’s sixth-highest-grossing film. July brought an onstage appearance with Taylor Swift during her ‘1989’ world tour. But The Weeknd’s most blatant assault on the mainstream came in June with the release of the fantastic ‘Can’t Feel My Face’, a Michael Jackson-aping club banger that reached the Top Five in seven countries and has amassed more than 65 million plays on YouTube to date. Stevie Wonder sang a snippet of it onstage in New York earlier this month. It’s one of three platinum singles (along with ‘Often’ and ‘The Hills’) already released from ‘Beauty Behind The Madness’, the follow-up to Tesfaye’s 2013 major label debut ‘Kiss Land’.
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The Atlantic
Beauty Behind the Madness tries to cash in on the Toronto R&B singer’s dead-eyed hedonist persona, but is at its best when it lightens up. Here it is, the unlikeliest contender for Christian rock song of the year: “Angel” by The Weeknd. Over piano chords with all the uplift of a hymn, guitars in soft-rock reverie, and the kind of thudding drum sounds that kill on megachurch stages, Abel Tesfaye asks the heavenly figure of the song title to redeem him, to “bring the light.” For the song’s finale—the closing moments of the 25-year-old Toronto R&B artist’s new album, Beauty Behind the Madness—he and the singer Maty Noyes harmonize with what sounds like a children’s choir, proclaiming, over and over, “I hope you find somebody to love.”
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Spin
“I’m the nigga with the hair / Singin’ ’bout / Poppin’ pills / F–kin’ bitches / Livin’ life so trill.” So sings Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a. the dreadlock-pompadour’d, perpetually blue-balled and lovelorn singer the Weeknd, on the Kanye West-produced “Tell Your Friends,” backed by loose-limbed jazz pianos from peak-College Dropout or Late Registration. With such astute lyrics — perhaps his most self-aware to date — the bedroom-weary 25-year-old can’t be accused of not knowing his audience, which on his last tour comprised a theater full of 18-year-olds with XO tattoos and their chaperones gleefully watching him project NSFW film clips of the aforementioned activities. On Beauty Behind the Madness, his fifth full-length release (but only his second studio album), he’s also got an idea of his best future self, whom he thinks can be this generation’s Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston.
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Consequence of Sound
Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, has been a thing for a while, but only recently did he become a big thing. In July, Taylor Swift brought him onstage at a stadium show in New Jersey. Stevie Wonder, an influence on Tesfaye’s own biggest influence Michael Jackson, did his own version of The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face” last week. At one point in June, all three of the top Billboard Hot R&B Songs belonged to Tesfaye, something no artist had achieved before. Beauty Behind the Madness, Tesfaye’s follow-up to 2013’s Kiss Land, arrives at just the time you’d expect a new Weeknd album to come out. You’d be forgiven for thinking it must have been rushed, resulting in more commercial, less artful results than anything Tesfaye has done before.
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Hip Hop DX
Five years and what amounts to five studio albums worth of releases into The Weeknd’s career, and on Beauty Behind The Madness he finally unleashes the fully unhinged hedonist pop star character that he’s so carefully cultivated. 65 minutes after listening through the release, you may have accidentally overdosed after being exposed to the contact high from the album’s druggy lyrical content. Or, if still able to feel your face, you’re definitely still likely to be completely bowled over by the work done by not just The Weeknd as a vocalist, but a top tier crew of producers, arrangers, songwriters and engineers on the release. In reaching out and grabbing every pop sound that’s been successful in the past half-century of mainstream pop, rolling it tightly in a blunt and setting them ablaze with Abel Tesfaye’s sonorous vocals, this release gets much higher than most anything else released in 2015.
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Pretty Much Amazing
No one can drain the glamor and excitement from sex, drugs, and R&B quite like Abel Tesfaye. His first three releases as the Weeknd were moody, desperate transmissions. House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence arrived from a nihilistic, alien world. (Or maybe not. For your own sake, I sure hope their lyrics remain far from relatable.) Collected on the startling Trilogy, those mixtapes were improved by the Weeknd’s near-total anonymity. When they dropped in 2011, Tesfaye was a young Torontonian folding clothes at a retail job. He built on the mystery, revealing little more than some murky photographs of himself. We learned a few crucial details, such as his connection to hometown hero Drake. (And that he’d worked with producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo.) But Tesfaye maintained a low profile amidst escalating acclaim. Like the animatronic monster from Jaws, less exposure only heightened the tension. We had to fill in his many blank spaces.
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The Telegraph
Just in case you’ve lost track of who’s who in the new wave of RnB, 25-year-old Abel Tesfaye helpfully identifies himself on his second studio album as the one with “the hair, singing ’bout popping pills”.
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Complex
The Weeknd wants to be a star. Complex said as much when the Toronto-born singer/songwriter/producer appeared on its cover in 2013 for his first-ever interview. Back then he was a shadowy figure best known for his strange haircut, work on Drake’s sophomore album, Take Care, and a trilogy of mixtapes released in 2011 that cemented his status as the No. 1 purveyor of dungeon R&B. To many it seemed as if he was content making music that appealed to a very specific audience: those for whom overly saccharine lovelorn tales were as appealing as a bottle of O’Douls. They were wrong. The Weeknd wanted more.
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The Know
If your only exposure to The Weeknd was via the VMAs earlier this week — which included Kanye’s much-publicized dancefloor get-down — you might be surprised to hear the 25-year-old’s new album, especially its symphonic production, dark and tragic rhythms, and addled lyrics. This is The Weeknd’s sweet spot, though.
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Genius
After Kiss Land was one of my favorite projects of 2013, I was forced to watch people complain about the album and label it a step down from The Weeknd’s magnificent mixtapes. While largely true, the album is still great in my mind, but there is no questioning that it is probably his weakest project. This new album corrects that as it certainly rivals his mixtapes for quality. Tracks like “Acquainted”, “Shameless”, and “Angel”, are probably some of his most songs overall, forget this album alone. Yet, in saying that, tracks such as “Losers” and “Tell Your Friends” and probably some of the weaker songs he has released. Luckily, those are the only two missteps on the album and otherwise, the album meets my expectations and immediately becomes one of my favorite projects of 2015.
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FACT
A maestro of dejected, drug-addled mixtape R&B who couldn’t break the mold of his impressive debut House of Balloons with his inability to advance his sound on its two subsequent follow-ups Thursday and Echoes of Silence (later released in compilation as a full-length proper album called Trilogy), Tesfaye continuously dwindled in Balloons’s wake. His second LP Kiss Land further crumbled his good will, with its lackluster innovation: the title track, for example, recycled a Main Attrakionz beat. But with a feature on Ariana Grande’s ‘Love Me Harder’ and two major placements on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack, for which his efforts were devoid of the crestfallen filth we’ve come to expect from Tesfaye, a crossover narrative began to develop. This was only buttressed by the pop appeal of his summer hit ‘Can’t Feel My Face’, a thinly veiled ode to cocaine which landed him a stateside stadium tour and a place on MTV’s VMA stage.
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Immortal Reviews
Before 2015, when you heard "the weekend," you assumed you were talking about the end of the week. Things changed so drastically that year that today, if you hear the word "weekend" you're humming along to 'Starboy.' The Weeknd made 2015 his year by skyrocketing with success to legendary heights. He's a household name now, and it's all thanks to his 2015 sophomore record.
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Idolator
Big pop moves are easy to botch. For every 1989, there are countless debacles like Garth Brooks‘ Chris Gaines or Weezer‘s Raditude. The decision to gloss up in search of Top 40’s greener pastures may not be the bold career choice it was back when U2 embarked upon their Pop era, but fail at it today and you still end up looking like a delusional tryhard (see: Twin Shadow‘s strained Eclipse). With Beauty Behind The Madness (out August 28), The Weeknd is the latest artist to make a shameless pop grab. And no matter how improbable and imperfect the end product is, it’s undoubtedly impressive.
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The Verge
This kind of emotional jockeying seems insane, largely because The Weeknd approaches everything straight on, with no hint of subtlety. In The Weeknd’s world, women are either one-dimensional (keepers of the pussy) or evil (destroyers of the dick), but Tesfaye positions himself as anything he wants to be, and he wants to be a man with secrets. As listeners, we’re meant to be intrigued by these secrets, even if their basis in reality is unclear. Beauty Behind the Madness is not thematically complex, but The Weeknd has shaped its setting (dark, drunk) so that we might think it is. Tesfaye wants us to confuse memoir for metaphor.
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Sputnik Music
Go tell your friends.
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Atwood Magazine
Abel Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd) has come a long way since his humble beginnings in 2011. He makes a point to remind his audience of this in his sophomore studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness (released 8/28/2015 via XO/Republic Records), a 14-track compilation filled with varying musical elements that are sure to excite both old and new fans of The Weeknd.
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Independent
Although his most assured assault yet on pop stardom, Beauty Behind the Madness leaves one feeling just as estranged from Abel Tesfaye’s depraved character as previous releases boasting less adhesive tunes.
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Entertainment Weekly
Is there a more unlikely pop ascent than that of the Weeknd? The Canadian R&B sensation (born Abel Tesfaye) began as a mixtape phenomenon, grew into an indie favorite, and is now dominating the Hot 100 this summer with the unstoppable “Can’t Feel My Face.” Not bad for a dude who began uploading spacey sex jams anonymously to the Internet.
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Los Angeles Times
"Foggy," "murky," "bleary" — those were the words that once described Abel Tesfaye's work as the Weeknd, in which this Canadian singer used moody, open-ended R&B arrangements to deliver clouded confessions (or were they boasts?) about living in a haze of illegal drugs and ill-advised sex.
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Vulture
In his new video for “Tell Your Friends,” Abel Tesfaye — better known as the Weeknd — buries a man alive against a desert horizon at dusk. As he finishes the job and strides through the desolate landscape in step with the song’s slurry, slow-motion pace (“Tell Your Friends” sounds, somehow, like if “Benny and the Jets” were a Drake song), the camera looks up at him from his feet, like he’s a larger-than-life antihero in a John Ford movie. At some point, another person approaches; Tesfaye draws his gun without effort and shoots them down. The video offers no narrative explanation as to why he does this — I guess we’re supposed to assume that he’s the kind of guy who’d shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. “This ain’t the right time for you to fall in love with me,” Tesfaye will warn with a bluesy swagger a little later in this record, The Beauty Behind the Madness, but by then we’ve gotten the message: This guy is bad news, baby. It wouldn’t be any clearer if he were wearing a black hat.
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Nylon
Beauty Behind the Madness is exactly what you want it to be: A healthy fusion of pop and R&B that's both ominous and alluring. There's a feeling that we will, perhaps, get to see a more sensitive side of The Weeknd; that his self-serving and heartless actions are going to catch up with him. We started the BBTM era with him walking away from a car crash as the sun rose over another sleepless night. The comedown was beginning to set in. Never mind that "Often" and "Earned It," two tracks released before the "The Hills," more aligned with The Weeknd's past work; Rick Wilder's presence in his subsequent videos as some taunting sort of personification of his dark side alluded to a change of heart.
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Pop Matters
Beauty Behind the Madness is released during a year when seemingly every notable chart success referenced '80s pop music in some way, ranging from R&B hits adapting Whitney Houston choruses to rock bands going the full John Hughes to Carly Rae Jepsen's critically-loved new set. By the time Tesfaye gets to yet another song that shamelessly echoes Quincy Jones-era MJ in the form of the less-flashy "In the Night", it still sounds fresh in a way that the relentlessly futuristic Kiss Land only wished it could be, even if it signals the fact that Tesfaye does occasionally lap himself in terms of texture.
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New York Daily News
DRUG ADDICTION, sex abuse, threesomes. Do these sound like common subjects for songs by someone hyped as the next King of Pop? Maybe not. But they might well be perfect topics for a star out to rewrite that role.
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The Line of Best Fit
The most interesting artists tend to cultivate a narrative that doesn’t so much run parallel to their art, as strike directly through it. The very best do it unconsciously. Judging from it’s title, The Weeknd’s latest album Beauty Behind the Madness seemed to hint at the possibility of a twist in the depraved saga of Toronto-bred R&B singer, Abel Tesfaye.
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Nest HQ
Beauty Behind The Madness is not a compromise. It’s not a sell out. Rather, The Weeknd’s new record is a honed edge of Abel’s anti-mainstream tendencies that, ironically, have connected wholly with the mainstream. That said, there’s still a pop machine at work. Prolific writers Max Martin (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Britney Spears), Savan Kotecha (One Direction, Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber), Stephan Moccio (Miley Cyrus, Celine Dion, Ne-Yo), and others are all credited in a good chunk of the 14-track LP. Interestingly, however, Billboard reported that even with this all-star team of hit makers on board for BBTM, the direction was always under Abel’s control. In their cover story, Billboard share a quote from Kotecha who co-wrote this summer’s #1 hit “Can’t Feel My Face” with Martin alongside additional album cuts “Shameless” and “In the Night”. He admits, “We were trying to bring him too much into our world. We had to learn how to move into his — to be more dark and innovative, and to trust him.”
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Odyssey
Sex, love, prostitutes, ballads, drugs, and then a splash of the modern day Michael Jackson; what’s not to love? Sounds like the perfect music cocktail, all mixed and shaken together, to create The Weeknd’s most recent and highly anticipated album: "Beauty Behind the Madness."
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exclaim!*# music
From the grand opening of electric chords on "Real Life," one can't help but feel that the Weeknd's second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness, is a momentous occasion; it's on this album that Abel Tesfaye makes the transition from cult favourite to icon. The brooding nourish R&B crooner preserves the spacey magnificence that has set him apart from other artists of a similar ilk, but does so with superior production to that of his previous works; he's now armed with a sound that is larger and more artfully orchestrated.
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Chicago Tribune
In the video for the song that dominated the summer, The Weeknd's "Can't Feel My Face," Abel Tesfaye goes up in flames. And he does it while busting dance moves that belie the singer-songwriter-producer's reputation for moody introspection. As he dances, a club full of celebrants joins him, and not even his immolation can stop the party. It's disturbing but addictive, cyanide with a pop-candy exterior.
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The Star
Stung by the relatively cool critical and commercial reception his debut album received, Toronto’s Abel Tesfaye has thus made a shameless lunge for the top of the pops, Max Martin co-write and all, with the follow-up, Beauty Behind the Madness. And he might just get there.
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The New York Times
On this album, clear-cut intros, verses, choruses and bridges have replaced bleary incantations, and the music has moved from the shadowy haze of trip-hop to an emphatic, monumental clarity — high-end pop craftsmanship. The production still conjures huge spaces, but now they are brightly illuminated, with each sound in crisp focus. There are echoes of Peter Gabriel, Depeche Mode and above all Michael Jackson, both in the production and in the way the Weeknd makes his voice tense, plaintive and percussive. The makeover has already paid off in two hit songs: “Earned It,” from the “Fifty Shades of Grey” soundtrack, with Mr. Moccio among the songwriters, and “Can’t Feel My Face,” with Mr. Martin and others.
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Clash
On album number two, The Weeknd's Abel Tesfaye has stopped falling in love with prostitutes and started writing conventional pop songs instead, to mixed results. Taking the three bodies of work that made up 'Trilogy' into consideration, 'Beauty Behind The Madness' is actually record number five and musically there are few signs of progression. In terms of finding that pop audience, then it's a success - 'Can't Feel My Face' was the song of the summer, but in terms of doing something that's built upon everything that came before to ultimately make something better, results are sparse.
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AV Music
It seems fitting that The Weeknd, who built his early catalog on mystique and myth-making, opens his sophomore album, Beauty Behind The Madness, with a song called “Real Life.” His breakout 2011 mixtape trilogy—highlighted by opener House Of Balloons—capitalized on the mystery surrounding his identity, but ever since his debut, Kiss Land, collapsed trying to replicate PBR&B’s amorphous, trippy aesthetic, he’s crossed over as a more open and polished figure, stepping out of the sketchy, dark backroom of the club to make music for the people dancing in it. Last year, The Weeknd seemed to consciously pivot toward songs equipped for Top 40 radio, starting with a pop collaboration with Ariana Grande, “Love Me Harder.” After finding renewed life as a soloist with “Earned It,” the lead single from the Fifty Shades Of Grey soundtrack, he’s solidified his pop stardom with the upbeat, Max Martin-produced “Can’t Feel My Face,” a chart topper that warps a coke high into a flirty profession of affection with clever songwriting.
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The AU Review
The Weeknd are probably one of my favourite artists of all time, and their new album has totally blown me away. With its pure creative lyricism and catchy hooks coupled with dance beats, if you haven’t heard this album you’re missing out. Click through for my full review of The Weeknd’s Beauty Behind the Madness.
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The New Yorker
Tesfaye’s new album, “Beauty Behind the Madness,” is his bid for mainstream stardom, and it’s an impressive one. Any attempt at a crossover requires concession, and concession is especially risky for an artist who is so conceptually unyielding. One of the record’s opening lines is “I’ll be the same, never changed for nothing,” and for the most part Tesfaye makes it clear that he has no interest in moral redemption for the sake of success; the record is filled with the sort of exhaustive—and exhausting—nihilism that would make Bret Easton Ellis proud. When Tesfaye coos a line like “I’ma care for you,” it reads as a threat rather than as a reassurance. He is prone to obsessive navel-gazing, as on “Prisoner,” a song that begins airily before descending into almost cartoonish despair. “I’m addicted to a life that’s so empty and cold,” he sings. If “Beauty Behind the Madness” represents a departure from earlier Weeknd records, it is in terms of sound quality: Tesfaye’s cavernous, booming style is rendered in high definition, making for a lavish, expensive-sounding album.
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Plugged In
The Weeknd is the name Abel Tesfaye chooses to use when he's performing. But no matter what you call this guy, you have to say that he's a lover, a fighter, a player and a loner. It's that last attribute, perhaps, that most shapes Beauty Behind the Madness, the soulful Canadian R&B singer's chart-topping sophomore effort. The Weeknd sounds like Michael Jackson by way of Chris Brown, fused with the brooding pessimistic realism of Drake. But Abel Tesfaye never seems confused about who exactly who he is: a man who longs for love but who knows that his appetite for casual sex, his aversion to commitment and his tendency toward violence will likely prevent him from ever finding it.
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Daily Review
When Beauty Behind the Madness is good, it’s really good. Tesfaye’s angelic croon is often a joy to listen to, but aan hour’s worth of his messed up, narcissistic Lothario persona becomes. Many of the songs fall back on the familiar terrain of partying, drugs and sex with few signs that the cracks in the self-obsession will start to show.
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ACRN (All Campus Radio Network)
The Weeknd appeared out of left field in 2010 as a mysteriously intense new hip hop artist who has continued to hypnotize fans with his uniquely dark and sexy beats. Beauty Behind the Madness celebrates The Weeknd’s third album and marks a turning point for Abel Tesfaye. In BBM we see him move away from centralized hip hop and expand a unique sound that has been dubbed “dark hip hop.”
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Drowned In Sound
Beauty Behind the Madness is a glorious contradiction in terms as he attempts to be all things to all fans, old and new. Somehow, it works. Tesfaye may have tightened and maximised his sound whilst perfecting his smile, but The Weeknd is still racked with internal turmoil, still simultaneously bemused and amused by his dalliances between the sheets, of which there are apparently a great many. Can one become an all-encompassing pop cultural icon while dealing so unabashedly in wounds and grim debauchery? It’s a question that Beauty Behind the Madness ultimately poses rather than seeks to answer. Part celebration, part declaration, part maturation; Tesfaye’s second studio album proper presents a man seemingly obsessed with the opposite sex and his role in such encounters. If he’s not bragging about his prowess or justifying his actions - ”I don’t want to hurt you, but you live for the pain”, he insists on the notably clunky ‘Shameless’ - he’s turning knives inward, unsafe in the knowledge that he’s bad news.
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Edmonton Journal
As Abel Tesfaye finally steps out of the shadows and into the glare of the pop world’s spotlight, his references to illicit substances are getting vaguer and vaguer — yet his second major-label album, Beauty Behind The Madness, is still about addiction, whether it be sex, love or drugs. Or, as it turns out, his own songs — because there’s no way you can listen to his Michael Jackson-flavoured smash, Can’t Feel My Face, without wanting to play it over and over again.
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The 405
The Weeknd knew what he needed to release in order to please his young and intoxicated day one fanbase while simultaneously entering the mainstream running for the current title of King Of Pop.
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Soul in Stereo
On Beauty Behind the Madness, his second proper studio album, Weeknd aims to serve two masters — legions of fans who have latched on to his upbeat sounds, and longtime fans who remember him as the brooding recluse. It might seem like an impossible task, but Weeknd deftly bridges those two worlds.
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i-D
Despite gracing stages across the globe, Abel Tesfaye has still managed to gingerly slide beneath the radar. That was until two major tracks—the Ariana Grande cosigned Love Me Harder and Earned It off the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack—propelled the Weeknd into the greater public's vision. And now here he is on his second studio album, a full-fledged mainstream star. So how does the former prince of darkness handle the spotlight? Rather easily, actually. Here is a 5-point breakdown of what to expect from Beauty Behind The Madness.
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Dead Press
The Weeknd is still the torn soul of turmoil from hangovers, and romances developed for women that he can never maintain alongside with his lust for his nocturnal lifestyle and pleasures. Yet, he’s somehow been able to craft blockbuster hits out of tales about an untameable sexual obsession (‘Earned It’), addictions to cocaine (‘Can’t Feel My Face’), and compulsive booty calls (‘The Hills’) that have no problem with holding constant radio and TV airplay. The all-out woe is me troubled soul is still present, only this time it’s being delivered with a tad less shadow, and a bit more chirp and upbeat swagger.
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Cultured Vultures
From his trilogy of mixtapes to chart-topping collaborations, Abel Tesfaye has come a long way. For an artist whose dark retelling of R&B is severely limited to a lot of sex, love, drugs and then some more sex, the nihilistic sound of Beauty Behind The Madness is hard to ignore. What does he have to offer now? The same hypnotic, pained vocals only amplified and made more pop/radio friendly to make him a chart topper in his own right.
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True Too
Beauty Behind The Madness was always going to be judged on the success of its poppier-moments. While fans may bemoan such a change in direction, Abel’s brand of pop is anything if generic. Much of the sound of this album is brooding, intensifying stadium-pop backed by gargantuan strings. This is great progression, and while it may not entirely be enough for someone like me, one can never deplore a bold new musical direction.
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Monsters and Critics
Here with BBTM we see Tesfaye chronicling a story in the form of an ambitious 14 track album that starts with the Weeknd we know, a hard partying hook-up machine who doesn’t care about his self destructive nature, then gradually veers into, dare I say it, monogamy? With great, sexy jams in the opening tracks like “Losers”, “Tell Your Friends” and the 808 boom and swoon of “Often” you’re hooked in with his boasts of virile, hard drug use and grade A cheese. It’s with “The Hills” that impressed me early on, which shows Tesfaye transmuting from mellifluous to commanding over an insatiable single about him being better when he’s fucked up, which doesn’t sound radio friendly but very much a Weeknd kind of radio hit.
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Newsday
"Beauty Behind the Madness" takes The Weeknd's love of mysterious melodies and unusual musical twists to the next level. He drops rock elements into the lumbering "Prisoner," with help from Lana Del Rey, and adds unexpected guitar power chords to "The Hills." And he makes it all seem completely effortless, as if all these intricate complexities simply popped out of his head. That's the true mark of the album's success.
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Stereogum
Beauty Behind The Madness is the moment Tesfaye takes all the free-floating anxiety and fear and cold, clammy darkness that’s been in his music since day one and turns it into pure big-tent pop gold. I never would’ve imagined that the guy singing vaporous sex jams over Beach House samples a few years ago would become one of the world’s biggest and greatest pop stars in a very short time, but here we are. BBTM is a total and unabashed sellout move, and that’s one of the best things about it.
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The Boom Box
Any of those concerns of selling out are destroyed in the context of Beauty Behind the Madness, perhaps the Weeknd's best project yet. Everything that defined him in 2011 is still here: self-destructiveness, drug addiction, getting lost in meaningless sex with somebody whose name he doesn't even know. It's all here.
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Neon Tommy
The Weeknd explores the realms of both R&B and pop. So at times it feels like “Beauty Behind the Madness” is tonally confused as it’ll jump from a party song like “Can’t Feel My Face” to an emotional song like “Shameless.” Despite the discrepancies in pace and melody throughout the album, The Weeknd shines in all of the songs.
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GQ
Beauty Behind the Madness is relentlessly dark—especially for a major-label album with pop-chart pretensions and a duet with Ed Sheeran. Tesfaye has always loved to present himself as some kind of perversely anhedonic sybarite, endlessly chasing highs that only leave him feeling ever emptier. Apparently success has only allowed him to follow his compulsions to further extremes.
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Kettle Magazine
Beauty Behind the Madness is an ode to the King of Pop, to dancing, to finding love, with the excess and destructive hedonism taking a backseat.
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Kevin Cabanayan
The Weeknd made us wait all this time for. While listening to the record, the album was so packed with detail and emotion, we get to know the real Abel Tesfaye as an artist and a musician. Each song creates its own story that requires much detail, so this review is broken into two parts. Long story short, Beauty Behind the Madness will easily hit many achievements for the year to come.
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Vavel
Beauty Behind the Madness portrays Abel Tesfaye as a selfish man who can’t love. Either be it because of his old habits like he expresses in “Dark Times” or because of his career like he explains in “Prisoner”. Tesfaye is warning everybody that even though these songs are love songs, The Weeknd is just a mainR&B artist with a cold heart who continues to battle his old addictions and his ambitions.
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The Fader
Beauty Behind the Madness sometimes overestimates its own importance, too, like when trotting out end-of-song transitions that don’t add anything. But the fact that Tesfaye now seems to now realize that personal growth never happens in a straight line hints at a more nuanced understanding of the concept than the dude seemed capable of. Two steps forward and one step backwards is still progress, after all.
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Lincoln Lion Tales
The Weeknd delivered with this project. With exceptional production and The Weeknd’s ability to tell a story in his music, I feel safe giving this album a rating of 8.5/10. This album isn’t perfect, but The Weeknd provided us with a great listen that can be considered as an Album of the Year candidate.
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Wicked Childd
With a massive amount of momentum behind him ‘Beauty Behind The Madness’ sees a pop influenced album in which the production is smoothed out and is made more accessible to a larger audience. However this album is still dark, moody and contains lyrics about drugs and objectifying women. Abel has not changed much. One thing that this album has gained is a heavy criticism of Abel’s lyrics, with many critics calling him misogynistic. And honestly they have a point that needs to be taken into consideration.
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UVM Post
The Weeknd has taken a very introspective approach to the lyrical themes of Beauty Behind the Madness. The general conceit of this album centers around all of The Weeknd’s addictions in his life, whether it be to alcohol, harder drugs, or even a sexual addiction, and how the important relationships in his life are affected by these addictions.
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Eropium
BBTM is a blockbuster pop album and it shows. These tracks see old ideas brought to life with new resources, which is gratifying. Other than these extremely obvious lows, BBTM mostly juggles excellent pop with nicely produced filler. While it loses steam towards the end, there is a run of songs here that see the Weeknd fully closing in on his pop star dreams and embracing a universal appeal with enough tone to set him apart.
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Rapdose
The Weeknd‘s Beauty Behind The Madness gives us new perspective on his music. Abel Tesfaye‘s major pop transition seems to have sprouted out of nowhere, but in fact it’s been carefully orchestrated for years. The last studio album The Weeknd put out was Kiss Land and it did him absolutely no justice. Although Kiss Land had cool artwork, ideas, plus features from Pharrell and Drake, it still seemed to be missing the authentic elements. The music, the man, and the XO movement, have all grown tremendously over the past year. Beauty Behind The Madness is the culmination of what XO has grown into.
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Lipstiq
This album turned out to be an album where The Weeknd starts warming us up for more things to come and gets a little bit more personal.
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Evigshed
Beauty Behind the Madness adopted a pop-inspired direction. It goes with a lush sound,at once, airy and expansive. It is an approach that works, giving the lyrics of these tracks, the maximum out of them.
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WIUN Radio
Beauty Behind The Madness is not short of the explicit sexual actions and drug use references that the Weeknd has been known for, but that doesn’t keep his pop hits off the radio. His most popular track, “I Can’t Feel My Face,” is in heavy rotation on pop music stations, despite Abel’s confession that the song is about the numbing and euphoric effects he feels while using cocaine, rather than a girl.
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Disorder Magazine
Beauty Behind The Madness, a blistering high-tempo collection of soulful and energetic songs. and this year he has continued to do so. After building hype by releasing an abundance of singles and videos earlier in the year, the album has been well worth the wait.
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HTF (Hit the Floor) Magazine
Beauty Behind The Madness serves as a vague reminder of the reputation he’s built. The first half starts with the familiar moody instruments and heavy setting; gradually climbing to the dramatic peak of ‘The Hills’.
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The Couch Sessions
Beauty Behind The Madness, his second proper album, dips and smudges a little more darkness onto the canvas. The resident strengths are all here: precise pop balladry, grimy snares, and Tesfaye’s fluttery, emotive voice caressing your ears with very bad thoughts.
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The Spectator
Beauty Behind The Madness features both similar and different sounds compared to his first two albums. His latest body of work features more up beat instrumentals and more pronounced “pops” of percussion. Importantly, these are features that are welcoming to the ear. While the album does feel more up beat, happier, and generally more “pop,” The Weeknd does have several songs that bring up topics of addiction to drugs and sex and the loneliness that comes from these weaknesses of his past.
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The Mirror
“Beauty Behind the Madness” is different from anything fans ever heard from Abel Tesfaye. Watching him dominate the VMA’s with pop-smash “Can’t Feel My Face” in the same year the sultry “Earned It” came out has fans wondering what’s next from the Toronto native.
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The Illixer
All in all, it is not a bad album, not a great album, but time will tell as to whether or not the Madness is as compelling as the projects that made him somebody to pay attention to in the first place. But for now, enjoy Abel's Beautiful disaster.
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Kurrent Music
With Beauty Behind The Madness, The Weeknd is finally able to launch himself into the pop stratosphere. The album is characterized by a series of fascinating contradictions; the production is bouncy but maintains an avant-garde edge, the lyricism constantly vacillates between unfiltered eroticism and sappy insincerity, and the mood of the project ranges from upbeat to dark and brooding.
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Dead Shirt
Beauty Behind The Madness is a suitably curious album from an artist as weird as The Weeknd. Tesfaye is an odd duck. Thanks to his hair, his silhouette resembles one of the Lynchian hallucinations Will Graham keeps having on Hannibal. The album’s title sounds like the header on a seventeen-year-old’s Tumblr page, no doubt filled with a nigh-infinite scroll of Fiji water bottles, dimly lit selfies captioned with caustic aphorisms, and images of couples eating coffee table sized portions of McDonald’s french fries with hashtags that say “goals af.”
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Hip Hop N More
Beauty Behind The Madness is a body of work which truly tells the story that the masses are now ready to hear. Over a wide-ranging, genre-crossing sonic palette, with this album The Weeknd works outside of his comfort zone in order to take his artistry to an accessible place, but one rooted in a sinful world where years of self-inflicted pain and misery meet the worthy adversaries of love and success.
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Glamour
You may find yourself suddenly inspired to do the Thriller (yes, there are hints of Michael Jackson throughout) or crooning passionately alongside the album's featured guests (hello, Lana Del Ray and Ed Sheeran)—whatever your style, you gotta give *Beauty Behind the Madness *a listen.*
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Pulse
“Beauty Behind The Madness” embodies the elements and themes of drugs, sex, relationships, pain and pursuit of fame continue.
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Mind Equals Blown
No track misses the mark, no beat seems out of place, and no emotion irrelevant on Beauty Behind The Madness. The Weeknd teeters on the fine line between mainstream success and underground indie appeal, a move that is unusual and definitely needed in today’s music. He brings something new to pop and R&B music, and it’s exciting.
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Black Sheep
While the album does sound much more commercial (read as, “polished”) than some of his earlier works, The Weeknd that used to shy away from public performances and hide behind his music is still present, although now, that humility has been exchanged for earned confidence. Beauty Behind The Madness will please diehard Weeknd fans, while entertaining those newcomers that recently discovered him.
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Treble
It would appear someone convinced Tesfaye to try a wide spectrum of musical styles. A noble goal, but genre-hopping requires the talent and versatility to fit different sounds. Tesfaye is many things, many of them less than pleasant in this writer’s opinion, but in any case versatility is not one of his positive traits.
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Respect Magazine
Beauty Behind The Madness, it’s almost like someone has noticed The Weeknd’s potential, and taken all of his new art and put it on display in a proper gallery, with all the lights, structure, and professionalism you just wouldn’t find in the uncharted streets and back alleys of modern R&B. This album is noticeably less chaotic, more cohesive, and structured than previous his albums and mixtapes. In addition, Beauty Behind The Madness is not quite as aggressive and dark as you would expect, yet drug use, alienated fame and women are still the foundation of the project. After all, that’s just who The Weeknd is.
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The Saint
Beauty Behind The Madness and particularly lead single and global mega-hit Can’t Feel My Face can be seen as nothing short of an all-out assault on the American pop mainstream.Make no mistake, the moody, genre-hopping blend of R&B, pop and programmed beats that made previous offerings such intriguing listens is still evident.
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The Girls at the Rock Show
Beauty Behind the Madness is a notable step in a more pop-oriented direction for Tesfaye, with a more polished and produced aesthetic that is a sharp turn away from the murky smolder of his earlier work. A noticeable instrumental presence is one of the first things I noticed after just the first track.
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Lyfstal
Beauty Behind the Madness is a cohesive pop offering that stays consistently impressive all the way through. There are moments where it’s evident Tesfaye is still having growing pains breaking through to that upper echelon of music stardom but there’s no denying The Weeknd as an authentic pop entity who is no longer the indie R&B sensation he started as.
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The Island Critic
“The Weeknd’s” newest album, “Beauty Behind the Madness,” seeks to capitalize on this success by refining his newly adopted radio-friendly sound. Unfortunately, the several interesting tracks that accomplish this feat are accompanied by an equal number of lackluster tracks that prevent the album from being the success it otherwise could have been.
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The Blog About Nothing
Beauty Behind The Madness resonates as one of the most haunting, coldest and heartbreakingly beautiful albums in recent times. It feels like from the opening track until the end we are taken on a very dark, but yet beautiful journey, and then it just leaves you all worn out and emotionally conflicted all alone in the dark.
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Renowned for Sound
The Weeknd doesn’t usually disappoint easily: if you’re after an album that has an impressive small handful of guest artists and various tracks that fill your headphones with intriguing sounds, you’ll appreciate Beauty Behind The Madness.
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The Peach Review
Beauty Behind the Madness is a perfect balance for his old and new fans. Many have been interested to know what sound would be produced after teaming back up with original producer Illangelo from his first mixtapes and adding Kanye West to the mix.
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Spectrum Pulse
look, this isn't a bad album, but I'm struggling to find more reasons to care about it, and that's not a good sign. Part of it is The Weeknd himself - there might be more of a story here, but so much of the beats feel recycled from his better albums with more grandiose production trying to get us to care when he doesn't.
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The Urban Buzz
Beauty Behind the Madness isn’t exactly what you’d call a “fresh” project. However, most would agree that it’s worth listening to.
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Spectrum Culture
Considering the album’s expectations and aspirations, it would be just short of a miracle if Beauty didn’t collapse under the weight of its own madness. And to its credit, it doesn’t, at least, not entirely. When it’s not trying to be something much grander, the Weeknd’s third album is a consistently good piece of subversive pop.
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Bit of Pop Music
The Weeknd has found a way to present his music to a larger audience with a slightly more accessible sound in an uncompromising way. If he manages to explore these talents even further and succeeds in keeping the balance between mainstream and alternative R&B, he could become one of the greatest in his genre.
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