The Weeknd - My Dear Melancholy

The Guardian 60

Abel Tesfaye’s surprise EP – the follow-up to the massively successful Starboy – features ghostly and gorgeous production but lyrics that are suffocatingly solipsistic

Few recent releases have had a more offhand kind of advance promotion than The Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy,. It isn’t so much a surprise release as one announced with a shrug: “Should we drop Friday? I’m indifferent, to be honest,” ran the text message published by Abel Tesfaye on Instagram earlier this week. Indifference seems a curious attitude to take towards something on which a vast team of starry talent has worked: its supporting cast includes Skrillex, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, Nicholas Jaar, French techno auteur and sometime Kanye West collaborator Gesaffelstein, plus songwriters and producers who’ve worked on everything from Camila Cabello’s Havana to Beyonce’s Formation. Perhaps its author’s apparent nonchalance is linked to My Dear Melancholy,’s brevity: at six tracks and barely 20 minutes long, it feels like an interstitial release rather than a major statement.

Or perhaps the apparent indifference is meant to signify that the Weeknd can no longer bring himself to care about anything much, crushed as he is by romantic disappointment. My Dear Melancholy, – whose title has a comma at the end, as if Tesfaye is beginning a letter to his own sadness – isn’t an album or EP so much as the equivalent of Tesafaye standing in his ex’s garden at 3am, pissed, holding a ghettoblaster over his head and bellowing along to Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now for 22 minutes. It even ends suddenly, as if she’s finally opened her bedroom window and thrown a shoe at him.

Related: The Weeknd: ‘Drugs were a crutch for me’