The Weeknd “Kiss Land” Album Review
Originally Published: 10/12/2022 on RateYourMusic
Score: 9.5/10
It’s easy to find this record exhausting. It’s so oppressively dark and suffocating, it’s like a giant cloud raining acid rain on top of some eco-industrial landscape you’d see in Death Stranding or something. These songs move at a snail’s pace and feel like monoliths of dark, haunting melodies revolving over and over and over and over and over and over again. The songs are typically broken up into different progressive movements which breaks the monotony from being too overbearing or even cheap, so there’s no worry necessarily about this record keeping its pace, but you just need to be prepared for a really lethargic, moody experience here.
The songwriting here is the bleakest The Weeknd has ever penned. This is just one long miserable monologue about his usual topics but stripped down to a stark, raw, disarming level of articulation. There’s little in the way of flowery poetics in most of his songs here, he just banks on his voice, the production, and the stultifying world-class engineering of this record, to get the point across for him. He actively attempts to sound not seductively creepy anymore, like some mysterious lothario could-be-like-Jeffrey Dahmer guy on Trilogy, but like he’s confirmed beyond a reasonable doubt for his next victim that he is in fact going to kill them after he fucks the daylights out of them.
This motif and the general “shallowness” of the songwriting here, as opposed to the more self-reflective Echoes of Silence that preceded this, and the slow, sometimes repetitive, hypnotic production, is what made people turned off to this record initially. I even found it to be daunting trying to get through this massive album the first few times I bumped it.
Many critics thought The Weeknd was trying to make party life, utterly meaningless tales of tedious “romantic” bullshit he’d be going through as a guy in his early 20s who is touring the world as a famous R&B singer, seem “meaningful”. I however don’t seem to hear anywhere where Abel is attempting to tell the audience “all of this…there’s a deeper message to it”. Frankly, all of the lyrics merely coat the huge production on here, pushing across the narrative of the album in the most minimalistic fashion possible without being too disorienting. But what then, if not profundity in hedonism, is this record about?
The Weeknd, who helped produce every song on this album, described the sounds of Kiss Land as being inspired from horror movies and soundtracks, as well as the Blade Runner movie and soundtrack. Ridley Scott and John Carpenter were two people he namechecked as inspirations for the album. The “point” he was making, and this is out of his mouth, is that this lifestyle is completely horrifying. Some of it is just fear of newness and breaking out of one’s shell, but much of this is just unbridled terror at the life he now lives.
Take for example on the title track, the climax of this album. None of the songwriting here is attempting to make the “party life” anything remotely resembling aspirational or profound. He pumps the production up with a ton of dramatic flair, but associating massive sonics with “profundity” is…your problem, I guess. The lyrics are starkly shallow and even “nihilistic” at times. He’s chronicling the troubles of his life, how intoxicated and horny he is at a concert, and the expectations and happenings of a sexual encounter he has with a fan he brought on stage. The woman takes a ton of molly and is grinding her teeth as a result, to the point where they begin to break (this in fact can happen in some cases), but he still wants head from her, so he makes her wear gold grills on her teeth to cover up the chipped teeth, while she fellates him for “tuition money”, and more drugs. He precedes this by describing how he hasn’t been in his own home in a year due to touring and living this lifestyle, to the point where he doesn’t even remember what the place looks like inside, and that he is getting so fucked up so regularly it is making his own doctor worried about him, even though he has no intentions on stopping.
None of that, is profound, nor is it supposed to be. It’s just supposed to be terrifying. This guy has left his quiet, shy life in Toronto as a faceless R&B singer and his now jettisoning forward as one of the biggest music artists on the planet. The road to that endpoint is, at this point, not something he’s even sure he truly wants, and is completely disorienting and scary. His health is in jeopardy, he feels like he’s losing his mind (“I can’t remember how it looks inside/So you can picture how my life’s been”), and he’s traded a warmer, possibly even happier, and definitely safer, private life for the daunting excess of the Big Time. And the Big Time, as it were, is not all that it’s cracked up to be. Once you get passed the grandiose and inviting aesthetic, it very soon becomes the most dark, hopeless, empty way of life he’s ever experienced, and he has truly no idea what to make of it.
The “profundity” of this record is not Abel creating a sonic effigy of and for himself for getting fellatio in his dressing room from a woman who is grinding her teeth into dust from taking molly. It’s that he’s absolutely mortified by how ridiculous, excessive, and grotesque his life has become. There’s no stability and center point in his life, he’s all over the world singing his heart out with nowhere to plant his roots and few people who are any closer to him than a security guard, none of whom are romantic interests. A year of that, especially coming from The Weeknd’s modest background, can fuck your head up evidently, and how that feels, the creeping insanity of how precarious, empty, and hedonistic ‘tour life” can be, even though it has a very shallow veneer of beauty over it all with the fancy hotels and expensive…everything, eating away at his psyche and even physically wearing him down. The hypnotic tones here are meant to reflect how repetitive, pointless, and bleak his life has become on the road, just a nonstop “party” that is driving him nuts and pushing his body to the brink. None of this is glorification, or even an attempt to “dig deeper” into what these experiences “really mean”. The Weeknd knows damn well they mean nothing, and any emotional intimacy he had with past lovers and even just hanging out with friends has been substituted for this horror show disguised as a good time. That’s why he sounds absolutely miserable on every song here, regaling the most tedious, ridiculous sexual trysts and romantic mishaps you can possibly think of, juxtaposed with describing the ominous, numb, hyper-stimulated lifestyle he now inhabits.
The genius of Kiss Land is that it is supposed to sound like a horror movie told through the lens of an R&B album…in the future. He’s not 1:1 talking about his life, Abel has always noted that this character of his is in fact a giant dramatization of not just his life, but what he would like people to believe his life is. Behind closed doors, as he’s admitted openly now, The Weeknd is just a sensitive and shy guy who loves to sing. But he’s gotta put on this image in order to survive in the music industry and actually make his passion for singing something he can make a living off of, and thus, The Weeknd was born.
This album is really disturbing and creepy. Unlike Trilogy, which was darkly seductive and felt more like taking a walk on the “wild side” than doing anything life threatening, this album is really portraying a cold, empty, threatening void that is engulfing The Weeknd on his quest for fame and self-actualization. The life he knew is falling apart and a new one is being born. Though in retrospect it seems like everything panned out pretty well, at the time he was recording this, he had no idea what to expect, and some of the “ground level” work he was doing to build his career, and environments that he’d be put in to do this, were not exactly Beverly Hills nor as comfy as his familiarity with Toronto. He captures loneliness so well on here and really turns tries to make a powerful statement that the tour life is such a vacuous, stupid, meaningless exploit, that it’s really taking a toll on him emotionally and psychologically. A staggering feat and a tremendously underrated album for the Alternative R&B canon. This is just a pulverizing, bleak, despondent album from the top down, with The Weeknd delivering a career defining performance despite the angst and melancholy that, at the time, was the soundtrack to his life. While I nor really anyone outside of fellow superstars and adjacent public figures can acutely relate to this exact mindset, I think most of us have left behind comfortable lifestyles and “what we knew” to “better” our lives, in which the “betterment” was a long road paved with extremely harrowing and terrifying features, and feeling lonely on this new road. To that point, that’s why I connect with it beyond a fascination for its sonics.
Give this another shot if you haven’t already. It’s a creepy, seedy, self-knowingly cheesy horror movie disguised as an R&B album, describing the genuine terror and insanity of living such a hectic lifestyle trying to chase something that makes you so existentially fulfilled you can’t help but to chase it, disguised as a good time.
