Sidewalks

Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye hooks up with Kendrick Lamar here. The pair rap and croon about their upbringings on the mean streets of Toronto and Compton. The sidewalks they began their careers on were a stable support for their grind during their early days.

Tesfaye and Lamar first met during the recording of Drake's Take Care in 2011. Both artists contributed to that album, ("Crew Love" and "Buried Alive Interlude," respectively), before they had achieved commercial success with their own careers.

Tesfaye told Beats 1's Zane Lowe how Lamar paced around writing his rhymes over the course of a day in the studio. "He'd walk around. He'd play the record over and over again. I played him songs, the Starboy theme of course, which he incorporated into his verse. He would just walk around. We had food. He's writing his verse in his head. He would go into his phone, look at it a few and then put it back and start walking around. He then at one point he went into the studio booth and I closed the door and I could hear him yelling his verse in his head. He was really committed, you can tell he put his all into it." "It wasn't just a random Kendrick Lamar verse," he added. "It was something special because, again, I don't like to say this all the time, but we've known each other for a while and it's crazy how we started connecting on this record."