A central tenet of The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the liminal state between death and rebirth known as the “bardo.” The literal translation of the text’s title is “Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State,” and the Weeknd’s fifth album, Dawn FM, plays out like a series of radio transmissions from this transitory afterlife, with fellow Canadian Jim Carrey serving as disc-jockey-cum-spiritual-guide.
Carrey met the Weeknd, né Abel Tesfaye, at the latter’s 30th birthday party, where they bonded over a shared love of telescopes. But while the “little light you see in the distance” that Carrey refers to on “Out of Time” is indeed up in the heavens, it’s no ordinary star. They say that one’s experience of the hereafter is unique—“Heaven’s for those who let go of regret,” Carrey muses at one point—and for Tesfaye, it is, unsurprisingly, far from nirvana.
A sense of nihilistic dread permeates the album: “I know there’s nothing after this/Obsessing over aftermaths/Apocalypse and hopelessness,” he sings on “Gasoline.” It will likewise be no surprise to those familiar with the singer’s preferred lyrical themes that Tesfaye’s ostensible death is drug-induced: “You spin me ‘round so I can breathe…I know you won’t let me O.D.,” he declares in a callback to “Faith,” a track from 2020’s After Hours.
The real Tesfaye is, of course, very much alive, and his musings about death are largely metaphorical. “I almost died in the discotheque,” he sings on “Don’t Break My Heart,” faced with the kind of existential crisis that a painful breakup can provoke. Elsewhere, on “Take My Breath,” a lover’s death wish represents a means of permanent attachment and eternal love: “You risk it all to feel alive/You’re offering yourself to me like sacrifice.”
By far the longest track on Dawn FM, “Take My Breath” serves as the literal and figurative climax of the album’s propulsive first act, the song’s dizzying disco beats echoing Tefaye’s semi-cautious ode to autoerotic asphyxiation. Moroder and Cerrone are obvious references here, as is ’80s synth-pop; Tefaye puts on a faux British accent on tracks like “Gasoline” and “Less Than Zero,” which juxtaposes his self-lacerating lyrics with sickly sweet synths.
Another influence, Michael Jackson, is even more apparent on “Sacrifice,” not just in Tesfaye’s timbre and vocal hiccups, but in the song’s Off the Wall-era guitar licks. That Jackson’s frequent producer, Quincy Jones, appears on the very next track feels like an endorsement by proxy. Jones is less of an inspirational guru, a la Carrey, than a harbinger of Tesfaye’s potential fate. “Looking back is a bitch, innit?” the 88-year-old asks after recounting how fear and vindictiveness prevented him from truly loving the women in his life.
When Tesfaye strays from his more conceptual impulses and ventures into boilerplate slow jams and tracks featuring contemporary guests like Tyler, the Creator (“Here We Go… Again”) and Lil Wayne (“I Heard You’re Married”), Dawn FM begins to lose the narrative thread. But every radio station occasionally plays a dud that prompts you to turn the dial, and this one is at least brisk. “Every Angel Is Terrifying” traverses what sounds like a poetry slam in the metaverse and an infomercial selling immortality in the span of less than three minutes.
Tesfaye’s music up to this point has been preoccupied with seeking escape from the harsh realities of life through sex, drugs, and other forms of debauchery—and, apparently, a fascination with the cosmos. Rather than looking outward or upward, though, Dawn FM is a woozy, psychedelic deep dive inside the artist’s famously twisted psyche.
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