“I Was Never There” [ft. Gesaffelstein]

On his surprise-released new album, My Dear Melancholy, the Weeknd finally begins to slither out of the villainous persona he built up over the course of his last six albums. There’s tenderness and vulnerability in these songs, plus something that’s been in even shorter supply in his catalog: sincerity. “What makes a grown man wanna cry?/What makes him wanna take his life?” Abel Tesfaye croons at the outset of “I Was Never There,” the album’s centerpiece. What follows is some of the most sumptuous music of his career.

“I Was Never There” credits the abrasive French producer and Yeezus collaborator Gesaffelstein as a co-writer, and his fingerprints aren’t hard to find. The song opens with a high-pitched squeal that sounds like an air raid siren crossed with a deflating balloon. But underneath that noise, there’s a whole world of richly textured sounds to unpack. Everything here—from the crawling bassline to the glassy synths—is swaddled in reverb, lending the track a submerged yet dreamy atmosphere, but the mix is clear enough to reveal every last detail. Tesfaye’s voice anchors each layer of the track—gliding above, echoing below, tucking ad-libs into the space between sounds. Halfway through, the song inverts itself, revealing a resplendent second movement: Slippery, water-logged keys vibrate in place as Tesfaye, at last, lets his voice really soar. This is an old trick, to be sure, but where early Weeknd songs like “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” became more claustrophobic with each turn, “I Was Never There” starts out nocturnal and gradually lets the light in. The old Weeknd? It’s like he was never there.