After Hours is the album where Tesfaye stopped hiding inside the music and put on a face instead. His fourth record, from 2020, it has a look as much as a sound: a red suit, a bandaged and bloodied head, a man lurching through a neon Vegas night that never seems to end. It plays like a noir. Someone is in trouble, and the city lights keep flashing.

The music pulls the same trick the visuals do. The surfaces gleam, all chrome synths and forward motion, and underneath them sits something colder and lonelier. The biggest song here arrived dressed as pure euphoria and went on to break records that had held for half a century, which is its own kind of joke given the bruised character selling it. This is pop built to dazzle on first listen and reward the second, when you notice what the lights are hiding.