Don’t be fooled by its lovey-dovey title: Kiss Land found Tesfaye building on the world of its predecessors and exploring its darkest corners. The three mixtapes were re-released as Trilogy when the Weeknd signed with Republic Records in 2012, and the following year he emerged from the internet ether entirely with his debut studio album Kiss Land. House of Balloons alone would have made 2011 a banner year for the Weeknd-many critics ranked it among the year’s best albums, and it was shortlisted for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize – but before the year was over, he released two more mixtapes, Thursday (which featured a guest verse from Drake himself) and Echoes of Silence. He also shared his idols’ willingness to incorporate contemporary influences – in his case, moody electronic soundscapes and sampled hooks from post-punk bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cocteau Twins. Kelly before him, Tesfaye deconstructed the genre’s tropes by singing about sex rather than love, often doing so in explicit detail. ![]() It’s as close as the Weeknd comes to classic R&B, and it underscores how, like Prince and R. Even the song titled “What You Need” is really about what he wants. Throughout, Tesfaye comes across as the devil on your shoulder with the voice of a (fallen) angel. Every song on his debut mixtape, House of Balloons, feels like it’s unfolding in the dim-lit back rooms of a nightclub, and every character in them is looking to get high, naked, or both. In contrast to Tesfaye’s performative anonymity, the persona he cultivated as the Weeknd left little to the imagination. ![]() Within just a few years the Weeknd would embrace the spotlight and become the kind of pop star who dates supermodels and performs at the Super Bowl halftime show, all without losing his singular vision. That secrecy made his tales of sex, drugs and partying feel all the more unsettling – and riveting. Even after some of his earliest songs were shared on Drake’s OVO blog, it would be months before Tesfaye revealed his name and face. In fact, we had no way of knowing that he was a singular “he” – that the Weeknd was not a group, but the alter ego of singer and producer Abel Tesfaye. ![]() When we first encountered the Weeknd at the dawn of the 2010s, we had no way of knowing that he would become one of the biggest and most influential artists in popular music before the end of the decade.
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