It should be no shock that Abel ‘the Weeknd’ Tesfaye is a better musician than he is an actor, and the ugly underbelly of the show is better expressed through song
If you haven’t yet watched The Idol, don’t bother. HBO’s sleazy music industry satire about unhappy pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) falling under the spell of ludicrously creepy wannabe manager Tedros Tedros (Abel “the Weeknd” Tesfaye, who co-created the show with Euphoria showrunner Sam Levinson) is so bad it’s bad: a lurid miasma of grim titillation, saggy plotting, tonal confusion (let’s just say cringe comedy and graphic abuse are not natural bedfellows) and retina-searingly incessant displays of Depp’s underboob.
Yet if you have persevered with The Idol for whatever reason (sadomasochism?), you will have received an unexpected gift: a maddeningly persistent but seductively seedy earworm called World Class Sinner/I’m a Freak, the track that Jocelyn’s label are pushing as her comeback single in the show and that, in reality, is now being touted as a prospective summer anthem, having clocked up 11m Spotify streams over the past few weeks. Although Jocelyn is fictional, the track – which is both an arch collage of bad-girl tropes delivered with amusingly flat disaffection, and a shimmering dance-pop banger – very much isn’t. Credited to Depp, it was released on the first of five separate EPs – one for each corresponding episode (the series concludes on Sunday) – that together form an original, music-only version of The Idol’s OST.
