Blinding Lights
The Weeknd
Nineteen vocabulary entries, and two of them are borrowed from somewhere else entirely. withdrawals belongs to medicine and overdrive to engineering, yet both are used here for a feeling. English does this constantly — it raids technical fields for emotional vocabulary — and recognising the move helps with everything from journalism to lyrics. The adjectives are all states rather than qualities: blinded, gone, empty, cold. Note tryna in the word list, which is trying to written the way it is actually said. A2 suits the size of the vocabulary, and the relentless repetition of a synth-pop chorus is genuinely useful for a beginner's ear.
How to study this song
The card for “Blinding Lights” is built from 35 study entries at A2: 20 English words, 6 adjectives and 9 verb forms. Start with the glossary: city, lights and night come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. Nothing dominates this card: 20 words against 9 verb forms, so the study time splits evenly. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| city | ciudad | città | ville | cidade | stad | Stadt |
| lights | luces | luci | lumières | luzes | lichten | Lichter |
| night | noche | notte | nuit | noite | nacht | Nacht |
| overdrive | aceleración | accelerazione | surrégime | aceleração |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2
- Vocabulary words
- 20
- Adjectives
- 6
- Word combos
- 11
- Expressions
- 11
- Verb forms
- 9
- Quiz questions
- 35
More English songs at this level
Background
About the song
“Blinding Lights” is a synthwave and synth-pop single that The Weeknd released in November 2019 as the lead single from his 2020 album “After Hours”.
Built around a bright, pulsing synthesizer hook that deliberately echoes the electropop and new-wave records of the mid-1980s, it was written and produced with the Swedish hitmakers Max Martin and Oscar Holter, with additional writing from Belly and DaHeala.
The track became the musical centrepiece of the neon-lit, red-suited “After Hours” era that The Weeknd built around the album, and is widely credited with helping push the 1980s revival sound into the mainstream pop charts.
The Weeknd wrote it with Max Martin, Oscar Holter, Belly and DaHeala, and produced it with Martin and Holter; Anton Tammi shot the video in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
Did you know?
The song rewrote the record books on the US Billboard Hot 100, spending 90 weeks on the chart to become the longest-charting single in its history and the first ever to stay inside the Top 10 for a full year.
It also set records for the longest runs in the Top 5 (43 weeks), Top 10 (57 weeks) and Top 20 (79 weeks), and in 2021 Billboard crowned it the greatest Hot 100 song of all time.
Despite that dominance the track received no Grammy nominations, which prompted The Weeknd to publicly criticise the awards — a dispute that became one of the biggest music-industry stories of the year.
Charts & streaming
“Blinding Lights” is the most-streamed song in Spotify history: it was the first track ever to pass 4 billion streams on the platform and later the first to reach 5 billion.