The Song I Should Have Sent Selena Gomez

I should technically hate The Weeknd. He got to sleep with Selena Gomez and I, for reasons I still find genuinely inexplicable, did not. And yet here I am, incapable of sustaining even a mild grudge against the man, because hating his music would require a level of personal discipline I’m unwilling to maintain. Since Abel Tesfaye put out the House of Balloons mixtape at the start of the decade, he’s been building one of the more coherent artistic identities in pop: a specific flavor of nocturnal, druggy romanticism that keeps finding new rooms to wander through.

Lost in the Fire, his collaboration with French producer Gesaffelstein, is not subtle about its intentions. I wanna fuck you slow with all the lights on, he sings, in that practiced falsetto that makes everything sound like confession rather than proposition. You’re the only one I keep my eyes on, the sex is so good it’s priceless. Later the lyrics escalate: You said you might be into girls too, said you’re going through a phase. If you want, you can bring a friend through, she can ride your face while I fuck you. Written out like this, it reads like a Tinder message sent at two in the morning by someone who has confused confidence with charm. Sung over Gesaffelstein’s cold, industrial production—dark compression, negative space, the antiseptic hum of machines—it becomes something else entirely. Almost romantic. Poetry for people who know better than to want poetry.

Gesaffelstein is exactly the right collaborator for this. His production strips away warmth and leaves structure, which creates the perfect container for lyrics this nakedly transactional. The coldness makes the desire feel more exposed, not less. That’s a neat trick and it works every time.

I should have sent Selena Gomez these lyrics instead of silently liking her Instagram photos at midnight. Maybe a different outcome. Maybe the same outcome, arrived at faster. Either way, The Weeknd can apparently say anything he wants over a good enough beat and have it land—an ability I respect more than I should and envy considerably more than I’ll admit.