The second of three free albums planned this year from downcast R&B project The Weeknd, Thursday garnered an impressive 180,000 downloads in its first day, due in no small part to the star power of rapper Drake, who spiritedly endorsed the artist’s first album, House Of Balloons, and delivers a guest verse on this one. In Weeknd singer Abel Tesfaye, a fellow Toronto native, Drake has found a kindred spirit. Tesfaye’s music taps the same dejected vein as Drake’s recent work, and both acts are equally drawn to and disgusted by the party lifestyle and easy sex that many other young rap and R&B acts idealize. But where Drake puts a friendly face on his addictions and anxieties—at heart he’s a romantic, his search for the right woman merely complicated by temptations that arise from fame—Tesfaye pushes the same subject matter to lurid extremes that a radio personality never could. Throughout Thursday, an even gloomier follow-up to an already bleak debut, Tesfaye casts himself as an unrepentant ghoul, coercing women into hateful sex before coldly discarding them.