The Weeknd just broke a Spotify record

The Weeknd has broken a new Spotify record, dethroning Justin Bieber with a record the fellow Canadian held for nearly a year.

After the singer, real name Abel Tesfaye, released his new album Dawn FM earlier this month (which only just missed out on the No. 1 spot on the Billboard 200 album chart by only 2,300 copies), and has now risen to have 86,096,217 monthly listeners on Spotify, which is the highest of any artist right now.

The title was previously held by Justin Bieber for nearly a year, and he still holds the record for being the first artist to cross the 90 million monthly listener mark that he gained last month, but with Tesfaye’s current listeners, it may look like he could meet those numbers and even potentially beat them.

The Weeknd’s fifth studio album Dawn FM was released on January 7 as the sequel to his 2020 After Hours. Tesfaye has hinted that the new album may be part of a “trilogy” of albums. Fans are speculating that Dawn is the second installment, which means that a third is in the works.

In Rolling Stone‘s 4-star review of the album, Will Dukes writes: “We love our artists fucked up, frankly. There’s something in the deep recesses of self-induced suffering that seems to bring out the best in them. But it’s all fun and games until they wind up a walking self-help aisle. The 16 songs on Dawn FM don’t grapple with the idea of addiction in the way we’ve come to expect from him (none of the addled “glass-table girls” of last decade’s demon time), and infidelities amount to wistful moments of vulnerability as opposed to tortured diatribes. If there’s a self-help vibe here, it’s refreshingly light and accessible — self-help for the selfie set.”

“The Weeknd has quit his old haunts and is all the more lucid. That sense of clarity is deeply rewarding.”

Watch The Weeknd in his music video ‘Take My Breath’ here:

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.