Darkness, drama and Daft Punk: the Weeknd’s best songs – ranked!

Abel Tesfaye’s first album proper was released to a muted reception and middling sales – a relative misstep. But it’s not without its charms, among them the seven-minute, two-part title track: too opaque and ambitious to release as a single, perhaps, but with a dark power to its churning synth backing.
Co-written by Kanye West, among others – the 70s soul-influenced intro could have slotted perfectly on to The College Dropout – Tell Your Friends is a ballad that ruminates on fame in equivocal terms: it’s intriguingly unclear whether the lyrics are boastful or jaded, a litany of success’s spoils or a comment on said spoils’ meaninglessness.
The lead single from Dawn FM, Take My Breath is fantastic: euphoric disco-house with a synth riff that recalls Daft Punk’s Da Funk, lent an iciness by the lead vocal. But it’s best heard on the album: the segue into it from the wracked How Do I Make You Love Me? is, well, breath-taking.
It says something about how smooth and successful the Weeknd’s collaboration with Daft Punk was that Starboy was written in 30 minutes, based on a beat that was on Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo’s phone: the result – mid-tempo, sleek but sad – went on to sell a staggering 11m copies in the US.
On any other album – or rather an album that didn’t also feature Blinding Lights – Save Your Tears would be the unequivocal smash hit: a fabulous retooling of clipped synthpop with a killer melody, that smartly digs deep into the ineffable melancholy that lurks around a lot of 80s anthems.
A triple-platinum single that eventually occasioned a plagiarism lawsuit from a duo called Epikker – their case, which alleged all kinds of shady dealings, was settled out of court. But forget the legal drama and listen to the actual song: it’s a powerful, emotive ballad with a monochrome spookiness to the production that hits hard, whoever wrote it.
Another multimillion seller from Starboy, and as close to straightforward R&B as that album got, Reminder faced down critics who claimed the Weeknd was going too pop – “I’m like, goddamn, bitch, I am not a Teen Choice” – and co-opted a succession of huge hip-hop names as cameos in its video to underline the point.
An early sign of Tesfaye’s enduring interest in the 80s – it’s built around a sample from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Happy House, while the lyrics leaned into that track’s suggestion that happiness is seldom what it seems: as the song progresses, it’s increasingly clear the party it depicts is darkly out of control.
Falsetto vocals and a fantastic, slowly building production, courtesy of Metro Boomin, frame the apparently saga of a lost weekend in Vegas, and indeed of the Weeknd lost in Vegas: intended as Tesfaye’s farewell to a hedonistic era of his life, it all ends in grief in the back of a police car.
A lengthy two-part track that embodies the sleazy persona debuted on Tesfaye’s initial trio of mixtapes: coercive, manipulative, damaged, drugged-out. The skill lies in surrounding the lyrics with music that somehow makes a total creep seem oddly irresistible: an appealingly spacey, disjointed production based on a sample from indie band Beach House.
Given the persona he projected, Tesfaye was perhaps a natural choice for the soundtrack of glossy S&M-themed movie Fifty Shades of Grey. Nevertheless, he really pulled out the stops on Earned It – the dramatic 60s pop ballad strings were an unexpected departure, his vocal heartfelt and powerful.
The opening track on his debut mixtape, and thus the world’s introduction to the Weeknd, is an immediately striking entrance: the music offers murkily disturbing electronics, the lyrics attempt to talk an apparently unwilling partner into either taking drugs or having sex or both. It’s incredibly bleak, disturbing and unforgettable.
Its title swiped from Bret Easton Ellis’s debut novel – a marathon of coked-out ennui – Less than Zero was the Dawn FM track that most obviously recalled After Hours’ obsession with 80s synthpop. It’s a brilliant piece of songwriting: maddeningly catchy, richly melodic, far more downcast than its snappy rhythm suggests.
The highlight of the Weeknd’s second mixtape, The Birds, Pt 1 throws a clattering military drumbeat against moody synths and feedback-drenched guitar, made all the more unsettling for being kept low in the mix. The lyrics warn off a besotted girl: the acoustic coda speaks of genuine self-loathing and desperation rather than you-can’t-handle-me grandstanding.
Pop super producer Max Martin earned his keep here: Can’t Feel My Face propelled the Weeknd from acclaimed R&B star to pop sensation, loading a song that anyone could work out was a metaphorical paean to cocaine with so many exuberant hooks that its subject ceased to matter.
Another collaboration with Daft Punk, I Feel It Coming channels the spirit of Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson over a slowed-down take on the super-smooth disco sound the French duo had pursued, and offered the listener the unusual sound of the Weeknd being straightforwardly romantic: deservedly a huge hit.
After Hours begins in trademark Weeknd style: echoing guitar, falsetto vocals, creepy electronic atmospherics. But it gradually gathers pace over six minutes, transforming into an electro-house track without ever quite shaking the initial sense of unease: it still feels shadowy and ominous even as it propels you towards the dancefloor.
Its record-breaking success made Blinding Lights less a hit than a fact of daily life. You couldn’t escape it, or its subsequent influence: its 80s pastiche sound inspired a string of hits by other artists. That it somehow withstood being overplayed and imitated says something about its quality: it still sounds weirdly fresh.
The Weeknd’s debut single offered the sound and mood of Tesfaye’s initial mixtapes in a nutshell: murky, lo-fi music, impassioned vocals, lyrics that are alternately wilfully reprehensible and racked at their own lack of morality. It carves authentically appealing pop music out of deeply unlikely source material: no wonder it attracted attention.
In a sense, The Hills was the Weeknd returning to the style that had made his name – it’s certainly substantially less poppy than I Can’t Feel My Face or Earned It. But it offered a kind of widescreen take on the sound of his mixtape Trilogy, the musical equivalent of an acclaimed indie director successfully transitioning to mainstream Hollywood. Everything is sharper, bigger, more striking, without losing any of the unsettling power that drew people to it in the first place; it condensed his episodic song structures into four incident-packed minutes. He’s had bigger hits, but The Hills might be the track you’d play to explain to someone why the Weeknd stood out.