On the Weeknd, House of Balloons, and Its Massive Influence
Seven years ago today, the Weeknd’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons, was released online. One of my favorite records of the decade so far, I revisited it on its fifth anniversary and wrote about it. These are those reflections.
When House of Balloons first appeared online, five years ago today, no one knew who Abel Tesfaye, the man behind the music, was. I don’t mean that he had yet to enter the mainstream’s consciousness, but that no one even knew his name or what he looked like. I remember doing a Google Image search for “the Weeknd” after becoming enamored with his first mixtape and every picture of him was black and white, with shadows obscuring his face as balloons obscure the face of the naked woman on the mixtape’s cover. Furthermore, he gave no interviews in the year following House of Balloon’s release, only adding to the mystery surrounding him. This sort of anonymity is nearly impossible to imagine now that he has performed at the Grammys and had a number of ubiquitous hit singles, yet now, that publicity seems earned and inevitable simultaneously. While House of Balloons is a decidedly less mainstream sounding record than his two studio albums, Kiss Land and Beauty Behind the Madness, it is far from an inaccessible or avant-garde release. Every song has a hook, and while they may not be as infectious or immediate as say, “Can’t Feel My Face,” he is still working within established structures, just making them murkier sonically, bleaker topically, and more porous structurally. While he may have began operating on a parallel path to the mainstream R&B scene, they came to intersect almost immediately with Drake appearing on his second mixtape and the Weeknd’s sound influencing pretty much every R&B record since. This is a guy who covered Michael Jackson on his third mixtape — he knew whose lineage he was in and where his ambitions lay.
Tesfaye has one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. That statement needs no qualifiers, however, it was stunning, and a bit disorienting at first, to hear such an objectively lovely voice singing about such decadent things. It’s easy to get sucked into the Weeknd’s world initially due to that enticing voice, but whether it’s a place where you would want to reside or not is a separate issue. Tales of sex and drugs are the basis for every track on the record, and these are among the most disenchanted songs about these topics I have ever heard, both hedonistic and pleasure-free. Take “High For This,” where the message is, the only pleasure to be derived from spending an evening with the singer comes from the drugs they will partake in rather than from his presence or the sex they will have. On House of Balloons, the high and the orgasm hardly seem to matter for these are not activities one partakes in because they feel good, but just because there’s nothing better to do. Self destruction does not seem to be his goal, but instead something that simply happens to him.
The centerpiece of the album and, in my opinion, one of the best tracks of recent years, is “The Party and the After Party.” While it is a seven minute opus with distinct parts, Beach House samples, and several levels of nuance lyrically and musically, at its core, it is still simply a song about a girl who likes sex and cocaine that he wants to sleep with. Yet there is an underlying sadness to this track, and really the whole record, The lyric, “Gimme right attention or I’ll start drownin’ from my wrist” is bleak as it gets, implying that gaining attention from these women, having some companion to distract him from the travails of life, is literally a life or death situation. When he sings, “Baby if you knew, the feelin’ I would give to you,” it is the most unconvincing come on ever. While his delivery sounds sincere, the latent desperation breaks through, showing his true intent.
“Loft Music” is the album’s most upbeat track, musically, and even that track still states that “the only girls that we fuck with seem to have twenty different pills in them.” He’s clearly not looking for love, just a way to get through the night. The production is mostly quiet and subtly haunting, providing the perfect atmosphere for his voice to either soar over the tracks, or become a piece of the sonic landscape when he uses a quieter register, conveying the desperation and depression inherent within every track on the album. The record sounds as if it were recorded in a dark attic somewhere, in some secluded urban locale, the songs put to tape immediately following the tales of debauchery described here, with the intention of capturing these experiences as fully as possible as well as the emptiness inherent in them. While many R&B records are made for clubs and dancefloors, this mixtape seems more conducive to private listening while drinking alone or having the least passionate sex ever. The production is all of a piece, so much so that it is somewhat surprising that the whole thing was not produced by the same person. Few artists come onto the scene with such a clear and vivid vision, one so decidedly and successfully communicated.
Listening to House of Balloons now, years after its initial release, its influence stands out as much as its quality. It might not be fully accurate to name it as the first so-called alternative R&B album, the one that set the stage for Frank Ocean, FKA Twigs, Rhye, Tinashe, and Miguel’s more experimental work, but regardless, it still seems like a dividing line in the progression of R&B in the 2010s. And tonally, if not sonically, Future has been following the Weeknd’s blueprint for the last two years now — when they appeared together on “Low Life,” it seemed predestined. Even Drake’s next album following House of Balloons, Take Care — which features Tesfaye on two tracks — particularly “Marvins Room,” seems hard to imagine without this mixtape’s influence. It has cast a shadow over contemporary music, inviting others to join him in those shadows, creating a murkier, darker, more depraved style that is now omnipresent. Yet in spite of this style’s prevalence today, no one has bettered what Tesfaye does here.
Many R&B singers and rappers sing of lives that the average listener will never be able to relate to or fully understand — songs of glamor, wealth, and extravagance — but there may be no other instance where the listener will be more grateful for that than on House of Balloons. The album’s title evokes thoughts of a party, certainly, yet the title seems bitterly ironic, as the parties detailed here are nihilistic, rather than joyful. Many albums create a world that draws one in for the record’s duration, becoming a place of comfort and certainty. This record certainly achieves this goal of luring in the listener, yet by becoming one of its many fans, one becomes complicit rather than comfortable. It is a record that awes and overwhelms — a record I love wholeheartedly and revisit regularly — yet it is also one that discomfits, both rewarding and haunting the listener long after the party’s over.
