If You Like The Weeknd, Try These 5 Artists from Other Genres
The Weeknd is one of those artists who can send you down a rabbit hole or two.
You come in for the hooks, the falsetto, the expensive sadness, the red suit, the synths, the after-hours panic, the whole “what if bad decisions had immaculate production” thing. Then after a while you start wondering what, exactly, is underneath all this. Why does it feel bigger than one lane? Why does it keep opening sideways?
The Weeknd is obviously a pop star. He’s also alt-R&B, synth-pop revivalism, horror-movie glamour, luxury emptiness, and the sound of someone realizing the party is still going but the bill has already arrived. His music is built from contradictions: seductive and hollow, catchy and sickly, glossy and deeply not okay.
That makes him a fantastic gateway artist.
Follow one thread and you end up in 1980s synth-pop guilt. Follow another and you get trip-hop paranoia. Follow another and suddenly you are in neon electronic night-drive territory. Follow the cinematic dread and you hit film score territory. Follow the emotional ruin underneath the gloss and, somehow, you can wind up sitting in a room with Townes Van Zandt.
That sounds ridiculous right up until it doesn’t.
This is not a list of artists who sound exactly like The Weeknd. That would be both boring and mostly impossible. This is more like a listening trail of five artists from other genres, each connected to a different piece of what makes The Weeknd’s music so addictive.
Think of it as leaving the club through five different exits and discovering a completely different landscape behind each door.
1. Depeche Mode
For the dark synth-pop, the guilt, and the pleasure that already knows it’s a mistake
If your favorite Weeknd mode is the dark synth-pop one, start here.
Depeche Mode are the most obvious ancestors on this list, but “obvious” does not mean uninteresting. They built a whole musical world out of temptation, shame, desire, control, and the faint suspicion that pleasure might actually be a spiritual emergency. That is very Weeknd territory.
The connection is not just synths. That would be too simple. The real bridge is guilt. Depeche Mode understood long before most pop acts did that you could make desire sound huge and catchy without pretending it was healthy. Their songs live in that zone where the beat is moving, the hook is irresistible, and someone in the middle of it all is definitely making a choice they will regret very soon.
That’s one of The Weeknd’s great tricks too. His songs are often built on pleasure, but the pleasure is rarely clean. It is haunted, expensive, chemically extended, or emotionally doomed before the chorus has even finished. He turns the afterparty into a confession booth. Depeche Mode were doing something very similar decades earlier, just with more leather and more songs that sound like they were recorded in a cathedral after midnight.
What I love about Depeche Mode is that they don’t treat darkness like a costume. The songs are too sharp for that. They are dramatic, sure, but they are also practical about human weakness. People want things. People lie to themselves. People confuse surrender with salvation. Depeche Mode turn all of that into giant pop songs.
Start with Violator. That’s the cleanest Weeknd bridge: “Enjoy the Silence,” “Policy of Truth,” “World in My Eyes,” “Personal Jesus.” If you want the colder, bigger version after that, go to Music for the Masses. If you want them darker and more severe, try Black Celebration.
If The Weeknd gives you the glamorous afterparty where everybody is pretending not to feel terrible, Depeche Mode give you the moment on the way there when somebody already knows tonight is going to go badly and decides to go anyway.
2. Massive Attack
For the murk, the pressure, and the feeling that intimacy might be dangerous
If early Weeknd is your Weeknd, this is where I’d send you next.
Especially if the version of him you love is the House of Balloons version, the one where everything feels chemically extended, emotionally compromised, and just a little bit trapped behind fogged glass. Massive Attack do not give you the same kind of pop hooks, and they do not give you a Weeknd-style vocal performance. What they give you is the space those early songs feel like they happen inside.
Massive Attack move slowly, but they almost never feel relaxed. The beats creep, the bass hangs low. The vocals seem to drift in from another, worse evening. Their music is sensual, but never in a way that lets you settle in and trust the air. Desire in their songs feels watched. Intimacy feels compromised. Everything sounds like it already knows more than it should.
That’s the connection.
The early Weeknd records were so striking because they made pleasure feel claustrophobic. The party wasn’t fun in any easy sense. It was too late, too dark, too expensive, too chemically stretched out, too morally slippery. The voice was beautiful, but the beauty only made the damage feel stranger. Massive Attack live in that same emotional climate. Their songs don’t explode so much as tighten.
I think one of the biggest things that makes Massive Attack’s music work so well is the patience. They build pressure and let it stay there. That restraint makes the darkness more convincing.
For Weeknd fans, start with Mezzanine. “Angel” is the obvious first stop, all slow, heavy, intimate, and menacing. Then go backward to Blue Lines for the warmer, foundational trip-hop version of their sound, and Protection if you want something smoother but still shadowed.
If The Weeknd turns the afterparty into confession, Massive Attack turn it into dim light and the feeling that somebody in the room knows exactly how this ends.
3. Kavinsky
For the neon, the speed, and the emotional bad decisions that look incredible in rear-view mirrors
This is the easiest leap on the list.
If After Hours is your favorite Weeknd album, go listen to Kavinsky. Right now. Don’t overthink it.
Kavinsky is the sound of driving through a city at 2 a.m. while privately casting yourself in a film about your own mistakes. Everything glows. The dashboard is lit up. Somebody’s heart is broken, but in an extremely photogenic way. There is almost certainly a red sports car involved, and it almost certainly symbolizes some form of emotional avoidance.
In other words, this is a very Weeknd-compatible universe.
Kavinsky gives you the neon-night-drive branch of the map. The Weeknd gives that world a voice in the panic, the seduction, the regret, the theatrical loneliness, the ugly emotional math happening under all the chrome. Kavinsky gives it an engine. His music is synthwave, electronic, retro-futurist, and gloriously committed to mood without apologizing for it.
“Nightcall” is the obvious starting point because it is basically a ghost-text from a gorgeous emotional disaster. It’s sleek, doomed, romantic, and just ridiculous enough to be perfect. The vocal sounds half-human, half-machine, which turns the whole song into a kind of automated love confession from somebody who was unavailable long before the first verse.
Kavinsky understands style can be the feeling. There’s no embarrassed little wink to prove he knows he’s being dramatic. He commits. The synths glow, the road keeps running, and the fantasy matters because the fantasy is doing emotional work.
That’s one of the reasons After Hours hit so hard too. The Weeknd didn’t just make a good set of songs. He built a world. The red suit, the Vegas lights, the blood, the grin, the endless night, the retro synths, the whole doomed-movie atmosphere. Kavinsky is not as emotionally complex as The Weeknd, but he speaks the same visual and sonic language fluently.
Listen OutRun, especially “Nightcall,” “Roadgame,” and “Odd Look.” If “Blinding Lights” made you want to drive somewhere you absolutely should not go, Kavinsky is already waiting with the door open.
4. Bernard Herrmann
For the thriller under the pop song
This is where the rabbit hole gets especially fun.
At some point, if you spend enough time with The Weeknd, you notice that a lot of his music doesn’t just sound like pop or R&B. It sounds like something else is running under it. A movie. A chase scene. A panic spiral. A gorgeous scene that is about to become a crime scene.
That’s where Bernard Herrmann comes in.
Herrmann, of course, is the legendary film composer behind some of the most psychologically charged scores ever written, especially for Hitchcock: Vertigo, Psycho, North by Northwest. He also gave us Taxi Driver, which matters here too. No, he does not sound like The Weeknd in any obvious modern-pop sense. There is no falsetto, no drum programming, no club energy. But if what you love in The Weeknd is the cinematic dread, the glossy panic, the sense that beauty and danger are sharing the same room, Herrmann is a brilliant detour.
What The Weeknd often gets exactly right is that glamour can feel unstable. The lights are beautiful, but something is wrong. The romance is real, but it may also be fatal. The image is irresistible, but it is also about to come apart. Herrmann is one of the great composers of that sensation.
The Vertigo score is probably the clearest bridge. It is obsessive, spiraling, lush, and doomed. It sounds like falling in love with an image and not caring whether it destroys you. Strip out the pop machinery and that is absolutely part of The Weeknd’s emotional language. Psycho is the more obvious horror-texture side. Taxi Driver adds lonely city nights, sleaze, isolation, neon, and the feeling of a person drifting out of ordinary human contact under artificial light.
That last one feels especially Weeknd-adjacent to me.
Herrmann’s real strength is that he makes beauty unsafe. His music can be lush and romantic one second, and a warning the next. That’s a huge part of why The Weeknd’s best music works too. He rarely separates seduction from damage for very long.
If The Weeknd is pop music with a thriller running underneath it, Herrmann is the part where the thriller steps fully into view.
5. Townes Van Zandt
For the emotional wreckage underneath all the gloss
This is the weird one, and when I keyed into it I couldn’t wait to write about it. (I did use Townes for the Sufjan Stevens post too so I apologize for the repetition, but I think this is the stronger connection. Possibly I’ll replace for a different artist in that post, but people need to listen to Townes so maybe not).
Townes Van Zandt sounds nothing like The Weeknd in the obvious sense. There are no synths, no after-hours luxury, no superstar image, no nightclub myth, no falsetto skimming over highly paid despair. Townes usually gives you a guitar, a voice, and the uncomfortable feeling that someone has been sitting alone with the truth longer than is probably healthy.
And yet this may be the most revealing jump on the whole list.
Because emotionally, the bridge is real. Townes is the stripped-down, rural, no-lasers version of one major part of The Weeknd’s appeal. Self-destruction. Romantic fatalism. Loneliness. Men who can see the cliff perfectly well and keep walking anyway. The glamour is gone, the city is gone, the money is gone, the performance is gone. What’s left is the damage.
That’s why the comparison works. The Weeknd turns collapse into pop spectacle. Townes turns collapse into a line so simple it feels like the floor just dropped out. “Waiting Around to Die” is as blunt as song titles get, and it still hits harder than the title prepares you for. “Pancho and Lefty” turns outlaw myth into something sadder and stranger than legend. “If I Needed You” is so tender it almost hurts to hear, because the tenderness arrives in a voice that already sounds like it knows what usually happens next.
The emotional engine is weirdly similar. The Weeknd often sings from the aftermath of pleasure. After the binge, after the hookup, after the panic, after the damage, after the apology that should have happened and didn’t. Townes sings from a different aftermath. The room is quieter, the road is longer, the luck is worse, the light is cheaper. But the ruined emotional landscape is not all that far away.
And that’s what I love about him. Townes doesn’t dress pain up. He doesn’t give it neon or choreography or reverb-soaked grandeur. He just leaves it in the song until you can’t step around it anymore. If the Weeknd had been born a generation or two earlier in rural America, these are the kind of songs he might have written.
Start with Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas. It’s intimate, funny, bleak, and quietly devastating. Then go to Townes Van Zandt and Our Mother the Mountain. If you want specific songs first, start with “Waiting Around to Die,” “For the Sake of the Song,” “Tecumseh Valley,” “Pancho and Lefty,” and “If I Needed You.”
Where to start
The best starting point depends on which Weeknd you love most.
If you like the dark synth-pop side, start with Depeche Mode’s Violator.
If you like the murky, morally slippery early-mixtape atmosphere of House of Balloons, go to Massive Attack’s Mezzanine.
If After Hours is your sweet spot, start with Kavinsky’s OutRun or just throw on “Nightcall” and let the problem begin.
If you love the cinematic dread in The Weeknd’s videos and album worlds, try Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo or Taxi Driver scores.
And if what really gets you is the loneliness underneath all the shine, go straight to Townes Van Zandt’s Live at the Old Quarter.
That’s the fun of following The Weeknd outward. The point is to follow the feeling, not to find five artists who sound exactly like him.
And with The Weeknd, the feeling leads everywhere from black-clad synth confession, slow-bass paranoia, neon engines, thriller strings, and country songs that sound like the sun came up and the damage is still sitting there.
The Weeknd is bigger than one genre
That’s one reason he’s such a good rabbit hole.
His music works because it isn’t only about pleasure. It’s about what pleasure costs. It lives in that dangerous little stretch between the bad decision and the consequences. Depeche Mode turn that stretch into synth-pop confession. Massive Attack turn it into low-pressure dread. Kavinsky turns it into a night drive. Herrmann turns it into suspense. Townes Van Zandt turns it into the song that’s still there after the lights finally come up.
That’s a very strange map, and also a very good one.
Looking for more artists to try based on what you already love? Explore the full If You Like This Artist series for listening bridges, soundalike paths, and new directions from familiar favorites. Check out:
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