The Weeknd Essentials

Nobody makes feeling bad sound as good as The Weeknd. Even the singer’s sunniest tracks (“Can’t Feel My Face”, “Starboy”) feel anchored by darkness—the sense that pleasure is pain and beauty decays and you can’t have the night without the morning after. The brainchild of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, the project took off in 2011 with a string of mixtapes that forged cavernous, falsetto-driven R&B with narratives drenched in drugs, sex and other regrettable decisions—a sound both sensuous and detached, feather-light and dead heavy. His music has become a symbol of hedonism pushed to bleak excess, with songs—“The Hills”, “Often”, “Earned It (Fifty Shades of Grey)”, “After Hours”—whose narrators can’t seem to say no even if they’ll hate themselves for it later. And though the sound has gotten a little brighter over time (“In Your Eyes”, “Take My Breath”), the prevailing mood remains heavy, even unsettling—the ride you want more of even when you’ve had too much.