Starboy Review

The bookends are superb. Starboy is a cold sneer of a title track, all vocoder and clipped guitar, and I Feel It Coming is a warm sunset of a closer that gets the pastiche exactly right. Between them sits an hour of a man with unlimited studio time and no editor. Reminder is a great flex. Die for You survived on its own timeline and became the biggest thing here years after release, which says something about how much the record buried.

But Sidewalks, Attention and Nothing Without You are filler, and by the back third the same tempo and the same subject matter start to blur into one long track. The production is expensive and precise, the sequencing is careless, and the writing coasts on brand rather than reaching for anything. It is the first Weeknd record that feels like a product being shipped rather than a mood being conjured, and the trade is worth roughly what it cost him.