"The Hills" received critical acclaim, with most reviewers praising the Weeknd's return to form after his pop-oriented direction with "
Earned It".
Billboard wrote, "His recent singles ditched his murky sound for shinier, poppier fare, but R&B outlier The Weeknd goes back to basics with "The Hills," an ode to druggy, illicit booty calls. "When I'm f–ed up, that's the real me," he sings over a dissonant synth haze in an arresting update to the woozy hedonism of his influential early mixtapes." Brian Mansfield of
USA Today noted that "when a song takes its hook from a horror film—
Wes Craven's 1977 cult classic
The Hills Have Eyes—you know there's bound to be trouble". In an analytical piece for
Pitchfork, Hannah Giorgis called "The Hills" "a dark, almost discordant meditation on lust, drugs, and fame" while noting that "to those familiar with his repertoire, the only twist in 'The Hills' is how it ends: as the final chords fade, a woman's voice, syrupy and sedate, closes with a lullaby of sorts—not in English, but in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia and the Weeknd's own native tongue". She goes on to trace the song's melodic and lyrical origins to the Ethiopian diaspora. She continues, writing that "the familiarity of Tesfaye's strained vibrato makes him the inheritor of musical legacies that Abyssinia has birthed for generations..."
Rolling Stone ranked "The Hills" at number 11 on its "50 best songs of 2015" list: "The Weeknd's second Number One smash of 2015 is much more like the guy we knew from his old mixtapes: Horror-movie shrieks and stormy electronics punctuate his seductive moans about a nihilistic affair, and somehow it's all catchy as hell."
Billboard ranked "The Hills" at number 10 on its year-end list for 2015: "Number one hits aren't supposed to be this sonically adventurous and dark, but The Weeknd can do no wrong in 2015. There's barely a pop hook to speak of here—just a beguiling, harrowing soundscape that's impossible to forget".
Time named "The Hills" the sixth-best song of 2015: "The music video for the year's darkest No. 1 single finds 25-year-old Abel Tesfaye a.k.a. the Weeknd pulling himself out of a smoking car wreck. It's a fitting visual, as listening to his twisted brand of R&B can feel like rubbernecking when he brags about dysfunctional relationships and being on so many drugs that getting high feels like decaf. Yet the song's throbbing bass and Tesfaye's horror-movie vocal delivery make the song, like some accidents, hard to turn away from."
Stereogum ranked it at number 11 on its "The 50 Best Pop Songs Of 2015" list: "With "Earned It" and "Can't Feel My Face," Abel Tesfaye climbed the charts by moving his sound toward the center. What's crazy is that after he got his foot in the door, "The Hills" became an even bigger hit without compromising his illicit, art-damaged aesthetic in the slightest."
news.com.au named it as the 24th best song of 2015: "This made No. 1 in America. Let's just let that sink in.
Donald Trump is trying to make them even more conservative and this ultra-dark song filled with way more than just swear words tops the charts." The
Village Voice ranked "The Hills" at number 22 on their annual year-end critic's poll. On August 29, 2024, nearly 10 years after release,
The Guardian ranked "The Hills" as Tesfaye's best song to date. == Plagiarism allegation ==