Beauty Behind the Madness Review

This is where the experiment ends and the career begins. Can't Feel My Face is a genuinely brilliant piece of pop engineering, a funk pastiche about cocaine that grandparents hummed for a year, and The Hills is the meanest hit single of the decade, all subwoofer dread and a chorus that admits it only calls when it is high. Around those two, the album is a negotiation. Half of it still wants the fog of the mixtapes, and the other half wants radio, and the transitions between the two modes are audible.

Earned It is a good torch song stranded in a bad film. The features feel like a label spreadsheet. Tesfaye's writing, always his weakest hand, gets exposed once the production stops hiding it: repetition of the same three subjects, women and drugs and the toll of the first two, without much new to say about any of them. Still, the highs are enormous, and it changed what mainstream pop was allowed to sound like.