It is 2020. 21st of March today. That means we are precisely 9 years away from the day on which one particular Canadian decided to eternally change the course of alternative R&B as a genre. That is right, the House of Balloons mixtape is just one year shy of his first jubilee today. 9 years. It fills you with dread to think of just how fast the time has gone by, even though one might get a feeling that only about 5 years have passed upon being asked just how far away 2011 is from today.

House of Balloons (2011) – The Weeknd

But, just how much has the world really changed since that revered day? I, for one, was 12 years old and today I am slowly but steadily nearing double that number. A bulky number of years will come to pass before I discover the music that was destined to change my life forever. Back then, Apple Music and Spotify have not come to be as of yet and people were still buying CDs to listen to their beloved artists. There were still only two known genders at the time and people were still able to watch Youtube videos without being interrupted by an advert every 3 minutes. It nearly sounds as if I am fantasizing with this last one. But, just to assure you, I am not. The world was a different place in 2011. 9 years of constant ideological, intellectual and especially technological development and exponential growth of human society. New ideas popping out of the human mind like babies out of uteruses after the World War II. Do the math yourself.

So, to get back to where this article should be heading, another thing can be assured. The Weeknd, back then scarcely more than a homeless fellow with big dreams of a Californian lifestyle of constant and insatiable debauchery, has come a long and strenuous way since that tiny episode in space and time, that has come to be called a day.

“You don´t know what´s in store”, he sings in his psychedelic, mysterious and hazy first verse of the mixtape opener High for This. He is talking to a girl, but he might as well be talking to the public. And, oh, how more right could he have been? Nobody knew what was “in store”. And nobody cared. His doleful voice, dark experimental sound,ž and lyrics filled with the darkest and most vulnerable corners of his soul were loquacious enough to get hooked. No one cared who this guy might be, apart from the creative and innovative music he produced. It was new. It was fresh. It was something we have not heard before and it quickly became a requisite piece of people´s music libraries.

Nobody knew what to expect on his first live show in domestic Toronto. Even the young Canadian of Ethiopian origin must had been nervous to death in the moments leading up to it. The first of his few verses were filled with nerves and yet people instantly knew they were a part of something special that night. The lyrics spontaneously flew off everyone´s lips and joined in with Abel to create a rapturous and magical atmosphere. History was made. If anyone cared to doubt the anonymous and mysterious artist that seemed to had sprung out of nowhere, his doubts died away that day.

So, was that all he had in store? Solid no. As early as August and December of 2011, two new mixtapes have found their way into the day. Thursday and Echoes of Silence completed what was to become a compilation album The Weeknd simply named Trilogy. Quite an amount of hard-core listeners still fail to properly recognize his newer work, as they are still trapped in the nostalgic tendencies of The Weeknd´s finest work ever created. And it is arguably hard to oppose such. Trilogy made its indelible mark on modern R&B and soul and undoubtedly put Abel Tesfaye on the music map.

Regardless, one (even so immaculate and unique) album was never enough to have “The Weeknd” written in the history book of music. Only his real fans and followers will recognize the real greatness that is Kiss Land, his first major-label album. Wildly unsuccessful and misunderstood in its own time, just as almost every modern-day thinker, ranging from super-radical Galileo Galilei to the likes of Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche, Kiss Land has only stuck when it was already too late. Beauty Behind The Madness, Starboy and My Dear Melancholy followed in the coming years, from 2015 to 2018, the latter being the closest thing to Trilogy the XOTWOD fan base heard in years. The Weeknd evolved into a worldwide-known celebrity. Everyone heard The Hills, Can´t Feel My Face, Starboy, I Feel It Coming. Before My Dear Melancholy got released, the Canadian artist turned almost completely pop at times, which was never to be expected back in 2011. Today, he is still selling out the compounds he is performing in, but he went from clubs and small Coachella stages to stadiums, arenas and the main Coachella stage where everyone still knows the lyrics to his songs. So, nothing has changed and yet everything has changed with his rapid ascension.

To avoid aversion and criticism, he has to produce music that will please his old Trilogy-bound XO fans, all the while he is expected to produce hits that will hit and occupy #1 on the music charts, which is an incongruous task. Regardless of external factors, he also aspires to stay true to himself and constantly improve and grow as an artist in the music industry.

Two years have passed since his last work got released. Three years and a half since last he produced a whole album of tracks and not just an extended playlist. And guess what? The over-extended wait and anguish have finally come to an end. One day has come to pass since the long-awaited After Hours album turned available on all streaming services around the world. It smashed the Apple Music record by hitting well over 975.000 pre-adds in the weeks, days and hours leading up to its release. And it crushed and exceeded all the high expectations Abel had to battle with.

The 14 tracks, which the album is comprised of, narrate a cohesive story about Abel´s life as a celebrity, regrets over failed relationships, sex, drug abuse, nihilistic notions, debauchery, hedonism and flashbacks of his early life. The atmosphere is dark, hazy, cramped, raw and it dissects the person behind it to the very atoms of his soul. Some will hear specs of Trilogy in it, others specs of Starboy and so on. But it is as different from anything The Weeknd has released before as ever. Garish signs of growth, regrets and sorrow fill you with emotions you never even experienced yourself.

After Hours (2020) – The Weeknd

The singer starts off by taking off his disguise and pouring out his soul, himself naked and raw. What follows might come as a bit of a surprise to all his fans who have followed him all throughout his career. One-night-stand-oriented love life and toxicity towards women who have tried to show him love, as he himself sings: “This house is not a home to you”, gets cut by a sudden rush of regrets over that same toxicity he embodied throughout his whole life and career.

“But I´ve been the hardest to love/You´re tryna let me go, yeah/And I can see it, I can see it”

A mature and self-critical The Weeknd the public has not seen before. The one who used to cause heartbreaks turned out to be a victim of more than a few, which evidently made him regret all the pain he caused. He sticks to this tone by neatly transitioning between Hardest To Love and Scared To Live (just one of the many reasons this piece of art should be listened to in order) before turning the record and swiftly returning back to his roots and life in Toronto. A throwback to his Starboy hit Reminder, but lyrically massively improved, starts off straight to the point.

“I used to pray when I was sixteen/If I didn’t make it, then I’d probably make my wrist bleed”

Simple and concise, yet ingenuous and filled with emotions.

Flashbacks and regrets over a choice of lifestyle he has set for himself as a young party maniac are a part of the same track, titled Snowchild, when he counters his old verse “Cali is the mission” from his Trilogy days and “Cali was the mission” from BBTM days by saying:

“Cali was the mission, but now a nigga leaving”

Clearly fed up with his lifestyle in Los Angeles, California, all he wishes is to leave the place where he has always wanted to live as a young unexperienced party-thrower. His disgust with LA reaches its epitome in his next track Escape From LA, which is coincidentally (or not) also the name of the boat of one BoJack Horseman. A fictional character trapped in the toxicity of the LA environment, celebrity culture, nihilism and self-hating tendencies. If there has ever been a show that illustrates the society and all its deficiencies brutally and directly, without any respite or light at the end of the tunnel, it is BoJack Horseman. Toxicity follows him around, destroying all his relationships, doing long-term damage to the people who try to get close to him. Drugs and alcohol represent the only solution to his eternally reoccurring struggles, but offer no long-term solution to his depression, nihilism and self-contempt. It all ties with Abel and his life as a celebrity, so it is nearly impossible not to draw any juxtapositions between the two. The Weeknd pushes people away and leaves them with wounds never to be healed. He tries to regret and rectify it, but battling with oneself is Sisyphus´ work, constantly going against your given nature.

“Well this place is never what it seems/Take me out, LA/Take me out of LA”

“LA girls all look the same/I can´t recognize/The same work done on they face/I don´t criticize”

He moves in the direction of self-reflecting his decisions, but quickly relapses into not being judgmental, as he does not care anyway. He tries, but he does not succeed. Does he even want to? He completely gives in to hedonistic pleasures, not minding how his decisions might affect the people around him, even though he does seem to regret and be critical of them.

Further into the album, he seems to spiral down into drug abuse and debauchery, turning back into his old self. His nihilistic thoughts seem to draw him into hedonism, steering him away from diving deeper into his soul.

“Light a blunt up with the flame/Put that cocaine on a plate/Molly with the purple rain/´Cause I lost my faith”

“God is dead and we killed him.” The words of a famous German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Whether this verse has anything to do with Nietzsche´s philosophy is a question, but the interpretation comes easily. Losing faith Nietzsche equals to losing the inherent meaning in life, pushing people into a rabbit hole of nihilism and searching for other ways of finding meaning for oneself. Nietzsche built the concept of an “uebermensch”, an active nihilist who found new meaning in a new system of values he rose from the wreckage of old Christian religious values. The Weeknd finds no meaning, so he gives in to the drugs, sex and other hedonistic pleasures. It only holds for a short period of time and as soon as the drugs start to wear off, he feels alone again, bereft of every meaning or hope. He additionally openly faces the existential threat of every human being, as long as he does not have to die alone, thus once again returning to his old ways of self-absorption, albeit in a romantic gesture.

He entirely defies his self-overcoming in the last minutes on the album, melancholic because of the pain being off drugs is causing him. Missing his lost love turns into him trying to numb himself of the pain and convincing himself that he does not need drugs, one-night stands or even long-term relationships. He wants to be a better himself or he will just bleed out by living the debauched lifestyle he used to crave.

“I keep telling myself I don´t need it/I keep telling myself I don´t need it anymore”

With this outro, The Weeknd comes a full circle by spilling out everything his mind contains, from regrets right to the pain and complete numbness. All this accompanied by futuristic, yet retro sound, with synthesizers and even saxophones filling the atmosphere with melodic tunes that you just cannot resist. It all wraps up in a downright beautiful, sincere and soul-crushing experience that can be continually listened to. It is the kind of album you need to give time to grow on you and you will eventually come to love it. And from my experience, all The Weeknd´s best works needed time with me. So, give him time, let him trigger something in you. Something you will never understand and that is marginally bigger than some words on a piece of paper. He has helped many a people overcome depression, heartbreaks, even their own shortcomings, and regret. As self-isolation is currently happening all around the globe, it is a perfect time to dive deep into the world The Weeknd is trying to paint for us, to reflect on ourselves and find inherent meaning in our lives that will free you of your cage and its limitations. The Weeknd seems not to be able to escape from his own prison of twisted morality. But, as Nietzsche said: “Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”