Abel Tesfaye wasn't always a familiar face. In March of 2011, when he released House of Balloons—five years ago today—little was known about the entity then only known as The Weeknd. Was it one person, or a group? Maybe the album, as many speculated, was a passion project from a more established artist? Half a decade later, we have the answers to these questions. Beyond the album's initial mystique, it has—in the years since being introduced to the public—shifted the current pop landscape the way few debuts ever have.

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Writer Sam Hockley-Smith joins FADER Canada editor Anupa Mistry and FADER senior writer Rawiya Kameir for a discussion about the initial rollout behind House of Balloons, how the album provided a new framework for music, the excess of youth culture, and why every Weeknd album since still must be measured against his drug-dazed debut.





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Anupa Mistry: The level of fame that Abel Tesfaye is currently experiencing is still so insane to me, because the rollout and aftermath of House of Balloons was unprecedented in music and for Toronto. That period of time is very clear in my mind. It was less than a year after Thank Me Later, and I remember feeling quite viscerally the disdain for Canadian hip-hop and R&B noticeably waning: outsiders started to get curious about what was going on up here, locals were rallying around a new civic identity.

We all sit around on Saturday evenings for OVO Sound Radio these days, but Drake was always curating—remember his blog? That's how I first encountered The Weeknd. As the clamor around the mixtape escalated to a full-on roar and as Tesfaye became a conversation point between friends, I began to put the pieces together: he’d been recording at Dream House Studios on Bulwer with Doc McKinney (who was a key Esthero collaborator); my homegirl briefly worked with him at American Apparel and said he'd sometimes play his music—though no one knew it was him—and tracks had been floating around on YouTube. The performance for the University of Toronto's Black Students Association popped up on YouTube, but other than that he wasn't, like, doing open mics or that kind of thing. It was strange to have someone achieve international acclaim without grinding it out like a lot of people had in the city for years.

House of Balloons was up for a Polaris Music Prize in 2011. I was on the Prize's Grand Jury that year so I spent a lot of time listening to it, and the other nominees, including Arcade Fire's The Suburbs. They'd won a Grammy for that record: it was clearly a fan favorite and the kind of grandiose statement rock album that used to define (white) Canadian identity. It's essentially navel gaze-y nostalgia—good and bad—for the banality of suburbs and it's a fine record but, as I listened to them both, I kept thinking about how Balloons was making a similar, parallel statement, about the city and the present. I'd walk around Kensington Market and Queen West and the U of T campus listening to it, absorbing this story that's actually imbued with so much self-loathing and love-hate for the excess of youth and the restless boredom that city life can also breed. The album was documenting a nascent scene that has gone on to shift the cultural paradigm of Toronto, and it did so through a sound that has had a lasting effect on contemporary pop music.

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Sam Hockley-Smith: Like Anupa, I first encountered House of Balloons through the October's Very Own blog. It was one of those weird things where it was never super clear who actually was looking at that blog. It always felt like a lifeline in an era of blogging that was more about discovering new artists than it was about coming up with any kind of concrete opinion about these artists (the OVO blog was an obvious precursor for Drake's long-running obsession with putting his stamp on new artists before anyone else). But my opinion on The Weeknd arrived fully formed. This was music I'd been looking for: a lurid, unblinking look at the loneliness of partying late night without glamorizing it. Like Drake, Tesfaye is really good at making sadness a commodity. This is probably going to annoy someone, somewhere, but Kurt Cobain was also very good at this, only he didn't embrace his talent for making depression appealing. Being lonely and sleazy and sort of a dark dude was actually embraced by Tesfaye as not just an occasional feeling, but an actual way of life. Remember when he talked about dreading the feeling of happiness in the New York Times?

The album, for me, was all—100%, 1000%!—about “Glass Table Girls,” the second half of the third track on the tape, and one that distilled every Weeknd cliche into one song: cocaine, all-night parties, and the unique feeling of complete and utter loneliness that comes with looking around at the world you've created for yourself after partying nonstop. In this world, sunrises are not beautiful, they're gross and they taste like stale drugs and bad decisions. It is close to perfect in that it does all the things people hate Tesfaye for doing. Listening to it will make you feel gross. A song that can evoke a feeling so palpable deserves attention.

Any act of myth-making involves pulling from pre-existing sources, dialing in on a zeitgeist and then expanding it into an entire universe. House of Balloons was so successful at doing that, that everything else Tesfaye did until “Can't Feel My Face” was measured against that earlier work. He'd probably view that as a burden, but I look at it as the ultimate artistic statement—accident or not.