The Weeknd teams up with ROSALÍA for the remix of hit song ‘Blinding Lights’ : Listen

Canadian superstar singer and songwriter, Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, better known by his stage name the Weeknd celebrates the 1-year anniversary of one of his greatest hits, ‘Blinding Lights‘ by joining forces with Spanish pop star ROSALÍA to deliver a bilingual version of the song.

There might be only a handful of music listeners who can’t recognize the song with the distinctive synthwave melody and the Weeknd‘s astonishing vocals. However, the remix takes it to another level by combining his characteristic falsetto with the pure and magical voice of the 27-year old Catalan queen, singing both in her mother tongue and English. She already showed the world that she was born to do this, releasing two successful albums, the latest ‘El Mal Querer ‘ in 2018, and working together with none other than Travis Scott, J Balvin, James Blake and Pharrell, to name a few. The Weeknd hinted the news about their collaboration via his Twitter, posting a picture with ROSALÍA on December 4. A lyric video accompanies the song featuring unseen footage from their photoshoot, both artists dressed in red, showing the Weeknd with the same bruises on his face, as he performed at the MTV VMA’s in August. But his fans don’t have to worry, as it turned out it was only for promoting his new album. He told in an interview with Esquire, that the “Blinding Lights” video is about

“how you want to see someone at night, and you’re intoxicated, and you’re driving to this person and you’re just blinded by streetlights, but nothing could stop you from trying to go see that person, because you’re so lonely. I don’t want to ever promote drunk driving, but that’s what the dark undertone is.”

Originally released on November 29, 2019, ‘Blinding Lights‘ has been in in top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for 41 weeks now and as a lead solo male, he surpassed the 12-week domination of Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You‘. It also went viral on TikTok, named as Spotify’s top-streaming song of 2020 with 4.5 billion global streams and won in two categories (Video of the Year and Best R&B) at the MTV Video Music Awards this year. It is the second single off of his fourth studio album, ‘After Hours’  written by himself, Max Martin and Oscar Holter and produced by the trio with Jason “DaHeala” Quenneville and Ahmad “Belly” Balshe. Despite being an impactful hitmaker with insane amount of streams and several titles in his pocket, he didn’t receive any Grammy Awards nominations this year, which only strengthened the controversy around the decisions of the Recording Academy. The Weeknd reacted via a tweet saying: ” The Grammys remain corrupt. You owe me, my fans and the industry transparency…“. Although the Academy overlooked his achievements, music lovers and fellow musicians, like Elton John and Drake, didn’t, who publicly defended him instead.

This brand new remix is definitely going to secure his and ROSALÍA’s spot on top of the lists again, so make sure you don’t miss out on it!

Image Credit: Rukes.com