Marcus Vinicius’s review of the songAfter Hours

Starting off as promising artist with a succesful trilogy of mixtapes that pushed R&B foward with a revolutionary sound, The Weeknd had fallen off since his rose to fame - delivering inconsistent albums with good-to-great singles, but that lacked a certain cohesion, falling into mainstream tropes and failing to deliver a good body of work - After Hours goes into the exact opposite direction, it shows Abel completely aware of how an album should work and be constructed - it has everything, from the smart sequencing of tracks that allows the songs to improve each other in context, showing an interesting concept and aesthetic that ties them together, while demonstrating both a diversity of sound and tricks and a sonic cohesion that shapes the album into something asking to be fully listened - combining that with a perfect sense of pop music, filling these songs with adamantium hooks and a classic pop songwriting - all glued together by an intelligent direction, that blends modern pop bleak and hedonistically depressive ethos with the hyped 80s throwback sound and its glowing synths, mixing the bleakness with the neon-like melodies resulting in a wonderfully nocturnal album - metallic production with an intricate mix of influences (going from Liquid Funk to New Wave), cold synths permeating the alt R&B lethargic atmosphere, a delivery that sees Abel in his most cathartic and captivating and a sudden explosion of gloomy euphoria right at the middle of the album are key-elements for propelling "After Hours" to stardom - all the edges are sharpened to full effect here.