This avant-­R.&B. was a hit with critics, but it didn’t always translate into commercial appeal. Tesfaye’s first major-­label album of original material, ‘‘Kiss Land,’’ came out in 2013. It was a Technicolor version of his mixtapes, full of long, fluid, semistructured, absorptive songs about desire and suspicion, but it sold only 268,000 copies, and none of the several singles the label pushed to radio took hold. His fervent fan base remained steady — when he toured, they filled arenas for him — but the Weeknd was a superstar act only inside his own universe.

Stymied, he turned to Wendy Goldstein, the head of urban A&R at Republic, for advice. ‘‘The underperforming of that record in his own expectations of what it was supposed to do shook him to his core,’’ she says. ‘‘I said, ‘You wanna be the biggest in the world?’ He said, ‘I absolutely wanna be the biggest in the world.’ ’’ She and the newly malleable Tesfaye got to work. First, she arranged for him to record the duet he would perform with Ariana Grande at the A.M.A.s, ‘‘Love Me Harder.’’

That track came from the studio of Max Martin, the Swedish producer whose influence on 2000s pop is matchless — his guiding hand firmly behind the careers of Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry. He works with a large team of writers and producers out of a sprawling residential compound in West Hollywood that was once home to Frank Sinatra. Martin’s hit-­factory typically solicits little creative input from the talent, who show up when it’s time to sing. This process was alien to Tesfaye, who had always written his own lyrics and was unsure that he would be a good match for Grande’s good-girl gleam. When he saw the lyrics that were sent to him, he found them to be tepid. He rewrote his verse, recorded it and sent it back.

What could have been a contentious exchange was actually edifying for both parties: Martin liked Tesfaye’s changes and kept them; Tesfaye realized he could make sleek, accessible pop on his own terms. He asked Goldstein to secure Martin’s services for his next album. ‘‘If I’m gonna be the biggest in the world,’’ he told her, ‘‘I need a handful of songs like that.’’

When Tesfaye went to Martin’s complex last fall to begin work, he set up in a wing where Marilyn Monroe used to live. Martin’s team presented Tesfaye with a selection of prewritten material, and he rejected it all. They worked from scratch instead, and the first song they wrote was ‘‘In the Night,’’ the new album’s most electric moment, a homage to and an updating of peak-era Michael Jackson. Before going into the studio, Tesfaye was listening to ‘‘Copacabana,’’ the 1978 Barry Manilow disco jaunt about the showgirl Lola, the bartender Tony and the murder that took his life — and, in a sense, hers too. Its exuberant arrangement is a wide grin masking unspeakable pain.

‘‘In the Night’’ moves in similar horror-­story fashion. ‘‘She was numb, and she was so codependent,’’ he sings, pulling back from the notes with a splash of Jackson’s vocal agility. The music suggests celestial escape. Later, Tesfaye reveals the wound: ‘‘She was young, and she was forced to be a woman.’’ Underneath its sunbeam-­bright euphoria hides a tale of childhood sexual abuse. For Tesfaye, ‘‘In the Night’’ was the sort of compromise he was excited to make, a glistening surface salving the wounds that are his stock in trade. When he first played the song for Ron Perry, the president of Songs Music Publishing, which handles Tesfaye’s publishing, Perry couldn’t contain himself: ‘‘It’s ‘Billie Jean’! It’s ‘Billie [expletive] Jean’!’’

In his dressing room before concerts, Tesfaye plays Jackson’s ‘‘Off the Wall’’ for energy. Musically, though, Tesfaye’s fixation with Jackson has often been obscured by foggy production and his reluctance to conform to conventional song structure. On his early recordings, he says, his producers ‘‘would always try to structure it, make it more into a song, and I was always a punk: ‘I hate major chords. I hate structure. I want this song to be eight minutes long.’ It would kill them.’’ Jackson’s lessons seeped in, though. ‘‘My head-space now is, I love choruses,’’ Tesfaye says. ‘‘A chorus is not easy.’’