My Dear Melancholy,

Before My Dear Melancholy, there was another album. Abel Tesfaye, who records as the Weeknd, told Time in 2018 that he had finished an upbeat record, written at “a different time in my life”, and scrapped it because he did not want to perform songs he no longer felt. The replacement came out on XO and Republic on 30 March 2018, 16 months after Starboy: six songs in under 22 minutes, his first EP. He teased it three days earlier by posting a text exchange with his creative director, La Mar Taylor: “Should we drop Friday? I’m indifferent to be honest.” He later told GQ he made it in about three weeks.

Frank Dukes, executive producer alongside Tesfaye, produced or co-produced five of the six songs, recorded mostly at Henson in Los Angeles. The guest list is long for so short a record. Mike Will Made It co-produced “Try Me” with Dukes, DaHeala and Marz, and Skrillex co-produced “Wasted Times”. The French producer Gesaffelstein is co-billed on “I Was Never There”, made with Dukes, and on “Hurt You”, which he produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Cirkut. Nicolas Jaar has a writing credit on “Call Out My Name” because it interpolates “Killing Time”, from his 2016 album Sirens; he later said he approved the use but had no part in the production.

“Call Out My Name” is a slow ballad in 6/8. “Try Me”, a plea to a woman to leave her partner for him, reuses lines he had sung in a 2014 live cover of Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love”. “Wasted Times” runs on a UK garage rhythm, as NME and Pitchfork both noted. NME singled out the first 30 seconds of “I Was Never There”. “Privilege”, the shortest track at 2:50, holds a wordless chorus back until its final third, by Pitchfork’s account. The subject throughout is heartbreak and anger. The EP arrived about five months after Tesfaye and Selena Gomez reportedly split, and Time noted it was called his breakup album almost at once; fans matched lines to Gomez and to his earlier relationship with the model Bella Hadid, and outlets from Vogue to CNN reported the guesses. He has never confirmed any of it. He told Time he did not want to “open that Pandora’s box”, answered Esquire in 2020 with “No comment” and in 2025 again declined to tie the record to one breakup. He has called making it therapy.

It sold anyway. The EP entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1 with 169,000 equivalent units, and Billboard noted that no album with so few tracks had topped the chart since a six-song Glee soundtrack in 2010. In April he headlined Coachella. In 2021 two producers sued over “Call Out My Name”, claiming it copied a 2015 track of theirs; Tesfaye denied it, and the case was settled in 2023 on undisclosed terms.

Critics drew a line between the producers and the songs. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis praised how inventive and cohesive the music was and found the lyrics self-absorbed. Jordan Bassett in NME found its peak in the two Gesaffelstein tracks and much of the rest done by rote. Pitchfork’s Larry Fitzmaurice liked the production but heard “Call Out My Name” as a rerun of “Earned It” and “Hurt You” as a weaker relative of the Daft Punk songs on Starboy. Rolling Stone was warmer, finding more of Tesfaye in these songs than in anything before, and Exclaim! gave it 8 out of 10. Consequence found it thin and half-committed, PopMatters judged that his early sound could not be recaptured after the pop years, and Toronto’s NOW found the songs dull.

That line is the case against it. Take away the guests and what is left is a mood Tesfaye had already set down in full on his 2011 mixtapes, led by a single cut to the pattern of “Earned It”. The good ideas, Gesaffelstein’s synths and Skrillex’s beat among them, belong mostly to the people around him, and the one thing that could have made the record new, the story behind it, is the one he chose not to tell. “Six songs. That’s all I got,” he told GQ. That is enough for a stopgap, not for a release that has to stand on its own. In 2025 he told the Guardian he was grateful its hit proved personal songs could still succeed, and that After Hours, two years later, was where he put everything he had learned.