Kiss Land Review

The concept is genuinely good and nobody, including Tesfaye, could figure out how to sing it. He wanted an anxiety record about hotel rooms and stage lights, scored like a Japanese horror film, and the sound design delivers: sirens, screams buried in the mix, synths that gleam like wet asphalt. What is missing is melody. Songs run six and seven minutes without earning the length, and the falsetto that felt hypnotic over the early mixtapes starts to sound like a man circling a room he cannot leave.

Live For, with a guest verse, is the only moment that behaves like a single, and it is an outlier tonally. Belong to the World lifts a well known drum pattern and then does not build on it. There is a devoted cult that treats this as his purest statement, and they have a point about the commitment, but commitment is not the same as writing. He fixed the problem by hiring pop craftsmen, and something atmospheric was lost when he did.