The Weeknd “Echoes of Silence” Mixtape Review
Originally Published: 1/14/2022
Score: 10/10
Remembering where I was in my life when this mixtape first deeply resonated with me, is not a pleasant time to look back on.
Most of my young life I was pretty numb. Really numb. The numbness was an alternative to feeling sad and hurt and nervous. People like to glamorize youthfulness as fun, but I frankly find it to be the pinnacle of capitalist decadence. It’s horrifying at times, you’re trained to become the emptiest, most cynical, most pulverized version of yourself in your 20s, and in order for you to be complicit with this annihilation of your individuation, you are encouraged to party like a “rockstar” day in, day out, so you are too overstimulated and intoxicated to feel anything.
9/10 people I knew who were regularly getting plastered and/or sleeping around prolifically in late high school-college were doing so to numb an unspoken feeling of disappointment that our present social structure can bring. The side effects of this disappointment turn into cynicism towards your fellow man, manipulative behavior, egotism, substance abuse, becoming a workaholic, et cetera, It’s a very dark place to be, and I didn’t quite appreciate how dark and bleak of a place that is until I had some years removed from that era of my life.
One of the worst, and most universally understood, aspects of the profound alienation we experience towards our selfhood in the world we live in today, is how awful people can treat each other while dating. How what some people refer to as the “highest form of human intimacy”, i.e. a respectful romantic connection between consenting parties, can be degraded into this miserable, carnal, exploitative power game. Nobody involved in said games, whether you are wittingly playing a game or are a victim of the power game of millennial dating itself, ever benefits from this. It leaves deep emotional scarring that frankly never truly heals. I’m years removed from 2016, the first time this tape really hit me, and I still have flashbacks at times, especially when I listen to this mixtape, that make my heart race and feel uneasy and anxious. 11 years after Abel released Echoes of Silence, he would pen a spoken word bit on his Dawn FM album known as “Phantom Regret”, which is when the latent feelings of regret crop up from time to time regarding lost love. There’s two sides to that however: The side where you are one who lost love, and the side where you regret having given someone a chance to begin with, because that pain they made you feel hasn’t quite healed. Echoes of Silence is the album that is centered around that second regret, the worst kind of regret, because it had nothing to do with you, but it hurts terribly.
Coping with this latter form of “phantom regret” will take the form in working yourself into an early grave, getting intoxicated so regularly that you are perpetually numb, becoming an emotionally manipulative piece of garbage yourself, or detaching completely from social activities. It can be a fusion of all of these things. And the whole time, you are feeling this burning, painful, skincrawling sensation of misery, emotional upheaval, insecurity, et cetera, that no matter how hard you try, isn’t going away, at least not according to any rate of speed you wish it to. We can describe this feeling as “heartbreak”, something that romantics have pored over for millennia. The Weeknd, another hopeless romantic talking about heartbreak, does have a unique twist on it, in that he perceives heartbreak as being a constant, and that because it is a constant, one should never even conceive of finding a loving companionship or even positive sexual experience from the outset. It is a truly Malthusian outlook on humanity, and Machiavellian, where humans are inherently bad, incapable of being otherwise, and must be exploited and deceived to remain safe. As melodramatic as that can be in relation to dating, it can put your head in a very dark place, and I have never in my life heard an artist capture that bleakness, that suffocating despondency, better than The Weeknd on this tape.
House of Balloons is a numb tape. It’s grayscale from the top down, it sounds like total detachment from life itself. Thursday sounds like coming down from the numb of House of Balloons, it is a bleak, morbid, cold soundscape, hellish at points even. But Echoes of Silence man, that is when the numb wears off, when the party is over, and you are face to face with the dark thoughts and feelings you use partying to cover up. That you deny are there every time you hurt another person or compulsively seek out some agent to become numb. This is Weeknd steeped, drowning in absolute misery, and is bearing his damn soul across 9 tracks. His voice here is his most emotive across the entirety of the legendary Trilogy, on songs such as “Outside” breaking into near sobs. Not a moment of lyricism on here isn’t sad, bleak, or hauntingly cynical. This is how being broke, dejected, hurt, and alienated feels like. It’s not even the sound of detachment, it is the sound of unwilling interdependence on the material world around you, and how cruel that phenomenon can be, its cruelest incarnation being the fundamental, incorrigible lust for companionship in a world that has been designed by the powers that be to reject intimacy and congratulate cynicism, domination, and exploitation. The peak of this level of despondency is seen on “Initiation”, which is the darkest, evilest song Abel has ever penned, where he takes off the mask and reveals why he is getting as (un)comfortably numb as he was on House of Balloons, because he is jaded, hopeless, and misanthropic beyond salvation. That when the party ends and the drugs wear off, he is alone, a small blip that is drowning the the suffocating echoes of silence that millennial alienation can engender.
This may very well be Abel’s best work. The entire album sounds wintery, haunting, mechanical, and lightless. It sounds like being a nobody who is tired of life itself, tired of having this unconsented burning desire for intimacy that often backfires and crushes you emotionally trapped inside them. I remember being very clearly in that headspace in 2016, where all my life was was meaningless career pursuits, hedonistic parties that felt profoundly empty, and recurring, revolving, damn-near industrialized serial disappointment I’d experience while dating as a young man in the white collar diploma mill that America calls “the best time of your life”. This is music only a young person could make, and that hits you unimaginably if you are a young person who isn’t having the time of their life abusing their liver, studying mindless garbage to make someone else money, and playing a chess game with love interests to see who can hurt who first. A masterpiece on all fronts, The Weeknd’s most vulnerable, disturbed, and unnerving project ever.
