It’s the Weeknd Day! (Hm, feels like there’s a shorter way to say that…)
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[5.75]
Nortey Dowuona: Now that collaborating with Rema and Central See and Headie One is normal and pretty Solange-esque, a formally strange artist collaborating with a more intentional and direct one lends credibility to one and grit to the other. With her new record, CAPRiSONGS, Twigs makes a direct stride toward the mainstream, enlisting playlist fave the Weeknd, who made this same trajectory much sooner. As the bass line is battered by heavy drums and Twigs slides between the piano chords, her voice is liquified into arsenic and sodium and shaken until the melodies solidify. The Weeknd’s stainless-steel voice traps the song before it launches back into the chorus, and Twigs’ startlingly clear-eyed lyrics return at the bridge but are smushed into incomprehensibility, the emotions disappearing with them. Then the song shatters, too slight to carry the feelings within them and yet too heavy to bounce them above it. In Twigs’ earliest work, her fragile, icy voice carried a human tone amid the dangerously sharp edges of her bladed-titanium musical collections. “Tears in the Club,” in its more recognizable format, is instead a cold, impersonal blender of musical styles: one with a name brand, made to chop mangoes and puree ginger, which costs too much for a regular restaurant. It doesn’t feel like any tears were shed, nor like any tear would be if it was played.
[6]
Oliver Maier: Not a novel concept, but more within Twigs’ wheelhouse than most people’s. The Weeknd with his anodyne croon make for an effective foil, Twigs’ hyper-poised emotionalism clanging against his robotic suaveness. This was probably never going to be brilliant and could easily have been tediously competent. I’ll happily settle for very good.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: “Tears in the Club” seems poised to bring Twigs’ music out of the cloud nothings into the corporeal world: Arca bringing the maximalism, the Weeknd bringing sleaze, Cirkut and Ali Tamposi bringing CVs full of Justin Bieber and Ava Max songs. There’s some Y2K R&B to it, as if Tahliah’s flipping two Ashanti tracks at once. But the resulting sound is even more remote, even less there. Maybe the contrast with the pop song Twigs could have made is why this sounds haunting rather than dull, dissociated rather than detached, a gracefully choreographed downward spiral. Even Abel’s verse, while indeed sleazy, doesn’t sound like it’s coming from a real dude but a projection of Twigs’ mind: a phantom duet partner who won’t leave a single thought unaccompanied.
[9]
Rodrigo Pasta: If FKA Twigs wants to go pop, we should let her. She’s got the compositional instinct, and she’s got the contacts to make it work. “Tears in the Club” could be a fine pop tune with some alt-leanings, and everyone on board is quite talented — or a genius, in Arca’s case. The foundation is mostly fine. But since it’s FKA twigs, an Artist who shows us the obscure and the sinister within ourselves (or something like that, I forget how the pitch goes), this can’t “simply” be a pop song. Every element has to sound distorted, glitched up, weird, to reveal to us something deeper… but no, this is just a sad pop song about being sad at a club. We don’t need the squeaky glitches in the drums, the terrible baby-cooing post-chorus, the weird compression in the Weeknd’s otherwise fine verse, the warbly vocal samples all over this for no reason. Once all the mismatched, purposely dissonant voices collide at the end of Twigs’ final verse and the drums fade (“I think of us together!”), does it evoke anything other than gross undertones? Stop playing around pretending to be serious, and have fun for once! Arca gave you a fantastic piano line, and you’re just going to bury it? Smash songwriter Ali Tamposi helped come up with a good melody, and you disservice it by turning the chorus’s final line into warbling nonsense — what, are words too direct? Oh, and it’s mixed like shit, because Serban Ghenea can only mix pop music, and this is not a pop song.
[3]
Micha Cavaseno: Twigs has released so little over so long a period that it’s easy to forget the girl who once seethed at the implication she could be more Janet Jackson than Kate Bush now wears every form of magickal costume like it’s her inherent right. Similarly, many must’ve forgotten that what worked on MAGDALENE weren’t the crossover attempts at mainstream gloom with the likes of Future, but her dressing her melodramas with the voice of one who could finally clutch at having to live. Inexplicably, though, “Tears” works wonders in how she twists her hurt and resentment into angelic purity, while Abel Tesfaye YET AGAIN finds his perfect role as foil of Dangerous Dark Prince against the pure-hearted she-Paladin. (See: “Love Me Harder” yet again, just somehow swap Max Martin for people who are two or three steps removed from Kode9.)
[6]
Leah Isobel: I know that “let it out like therapy” is a great line because it makes my skin crawl. And I don’t even like The Weeknd much, but his persona is so honed, his presence so weighted with meaning, that with one line he can overwhelm Twigs even on a song about how she’s trying not to think about him. He pushes “Tears in the Club” away from catharsis and deeper into the pleasure of heartbreak and longing. But the undercurrents of violence, always present in both her and his music, make that approach a little uneasy in a way that feels all too familiar. I love the graceful arc of the melody and the way the hook peaks on “fucked up”; I don’t love the skin-crawling feeling.
[7]
Wayne Weizhen Zhang: The Weeknd has done better than this half-assed cameo. He and FKA Twigs aim for futuristic dance floor melodrama, but the vibes veer closer to Taylor Swift and Zayn on the 50 Shades of Grey soundtrack.
[5]
Alfred Soto: The experience of clubbing may induce tears later, but no one cries in a club. Stop indulging Abel Tesfaye’s soggy fantasies.
[2]