The cover feels very The Weeknd. And so does the music - and we mean that in the best way.

Shortest honest description of this record: the Weeknd, gone dream pop. Not borrowing the look, wearing the whole sensibility, then routing it through hazy guitars instead of strip-lit R&B. Matching the styling, the Instagram and the music up is a task, but, hey, it makes James more interesting.

The press kit won't say it. It files the album under dream pop and reaches for the default trio, Cigarettes After Sex, Lana, The 1975, the comps you grab when you've heard the haze and stopped listening. The real coordinates sit a few rooms deeper: Doombird's melancholy, Launder's smeared guitar, the bedroom-jazz drift of Vansire. That's the texture. The Weeknd is the silhouette underneath it. R&B noir in a dream-pop coat, which in itself gives you an album worth listening to.

Start where the listeners did. AT THE TIME IN NEW YORK is the most-streamed thing here and the reason is plain: easy, catchy, layered with real care, simple-sounding because the work is buried. It earns the numbers without raising its voice.

Then it wanders, which is the actual story in many ways. CAREFUL opens like the Weeknd singing over a slow heartbreak ballad, all ache and restraint. STAY drifts somewhere near BTS, slow and warm, and it's lovely. THE FIGHT snaps awake like an Editors opener, quick, guitar driving hard. GIRL FROM HELL (NOBODY, SOMEBODY) carries the prettiest playing on the record. And one track opens on the texture we keep coming back to, the sound of a tape being seated into a deck, before a voice that sits down near George Ezra's low warm end.

No two of those share a lane. Not all nine connect, and we'd quietly drop one or two. But the thing surviving the spread is the thing the genre tag was built to miss: that Abel-shaped undertow running beneath the reverb on every track. The styling promises one mood. The album keeps refusing to hold still inside it.

The corroboration is sitting in the press kit, unread by whoever wrote it. A July single, HOW IT GOES, features Kodak Black. On the tidy dream-pop record the one-sheet describes, a Kodak verse is a non sequitur. On a record that's the Weeknd gone dream pop, a rapper turning up is barely a surprise. Name the album right and the guest stops looking strange, which tells you the genre label is the part that's wrong.

The rest is scaffolding. AT THE TIME IN NEW YORK was the SAFETY II lead single back in January; the campaign has since moved to WHO'S GOING DOWN, out July 2, and a winter staging of the entire Safety project as, with no apparent irony, a "dream pop musical." Eighteen cities. A lot of architecture for an independent catalog still modest by its own numbers, and a strange banner for a record that barely touches dream pop's obvious version on a single track.

The Weeknd went dream pop, deep-cut division. The tracklist is the only honest document in the pile, and it's stranger and more generous than the people selling it seem to realize.