There is a theory that the internet has conclusively done for rock and pop music's sense of myth and mystery, but clearly no one told Abel Tesfaye, better known as the Weeknd. He is a very 2012 kind of pop star, who releases his material for free on the web, declines interviews and instead communicates with his audience entirely via a gnomic Twitter feed and a Tumblr headlined Til We Overdose, on which he posts new music, photos of himself looking impressively off his knackers – boggling at the wreckage of a hotel room, fag in mouth; head in hands on the floor next to a bottle of cognac – and, occasionally, worrying handwritten notes: "mama I understand why you're mad – it hurts to accept what I am and how I live and what I did."
All of this is of a piece with his songs, which push Drake's self-examining take on the R&B loverman persona into more disturbing territory. While Drake agonises over the shallowness of wealth and fame, Tesfaye's songs inhabit an actively amoral universe where some kind of drugged-out degradation is often taking place, usually in a hotel suite with its curtains drawn against the dawn. A frail vocalist in a genre packed with artists who can sing up a storm, Tesfaye and his producers are nevertheless spectacularly good at capturing a small-hours atmosphere that's both queasy and compelling. The dragging beats, washes of synthesiser and eclectic musical references – chillwave and crunk hip-hop, Aaliyah and France Gall – somehow contrive to sound not just eerie and desolate but cosseting as well, inexorably drawing the listener into a deeply troubling world.
Echoes of Silence is his third album in nine months, and it might be the most troubling of the lot. At its centre are XO/The Host – a sneering, chilly dismissal of a groupie whose life has run out of control, with a great chorus, set to echoing electronics and drums that crack like gunshots – and Initiation. The latter isn't the first Weeknd song about using drink and drugs to coerce an unwilling woman into group sex, but it's perhaps the most horrible – rhythm clattering, the sweetness of the melody corrupted by the Auto-Tune effect that causes Tesfaye's voice to continually speed up and slow down. After it ends, it haunts you in the same way as a newspaper's graphic description of a crime or a disaster.
XO/The Host and Initiation sound like an artist boldly exploding one of modern pop's great myths and suggesting that what goes on in the VIP area is infinitely seedier and more unpleasant than the multitude of songs hymning its pleasures suggest. But more disturbing still are the songs that surround them, because they seem to cloud Tesfaye's intention. With their talk of meteoric rises and bullish predictions of continued success The Fall and Same Old Song seem not to be about a character, but Tesfaye himself. The closing title track, a reverb-heavy piano ballad, features a protagonist dismissing yet another corrupted and distraught female ("you're such a masochist"), but it's mired in self-pity: "Don't go home … don't leave my little life." The likelihood is that you're meant to think he is absolutely pathetic, to listen with your cheeks puffed out in disbelief. But taken as the conclusion to an interlinked trilogy of albums, there's a slight but nagging suspicion that Tesfaye is genuinely trying to elicit some kind of sympathy – he's certainly going all out on the impassioned vocal front – and that he thinks he's raising an important point about the complex nature of victimhood. Will no one spare a thought for horrible, predatory men? They have feelings, too, you know.
You're left unsettled, enthralled and confused, not least about where Tesfaye goes from here. It might be that he's simply playing a role: perhaps , despite the songs about inveigling drugged-out ladies into group sex and the photos of himself passed out, he's actually sitting at home under a slanket in front of The Great British Bake Off. If that's the case, then Echoes of Silence and its two predecessors represent a pretty staggering achievement from a brilliantly provocative and daring new artist. Even so, he is going to have to come up with a new role soon. As David Bowie would tell you, you have to stay ahead of your audience: there's only so long you can inhabit a persona before it gets boring and self-parodic. Alternatively, there's the slim chance he might not be playing a role, or he might genuinely believe at least some of what he's singing. Of course, that wouldn't make the music on Echoes of Silence any less incredible, but it would mean the future of his recording career is some way down on a list of problems at the top of which is: "Being an absolutely catastrophic arse of a man". For the moment, at least, Tesfaye isn't saying either way: it's all about the myth and mystery.
