The Weeknd is the first 21^st-century pop music star.  No, not the first star in the 21^st century.  Rather, he is the first musician to fully embrace the technology of the post-Y2K world in order to build his career.

For those unfamiliar with the singer’s history, The Weeknd was first exposed to the world via three recordings uploaded to YouTube around the beginning of 2011.  In March, fellow Canadian Drake tweeted lyrics from one of these recordings, and a few days later, a link to download House of Balloons for free from the-weeknd.com.  The blogosphere nearly exploded, and The Weeknd (birth name: Abel Tesfaye) gained tens of thousands of Twitter and Tumblr followers.  Just weeks after performing his first concert (announced on Twitter, of course) and five months after the release of his first mixtape, Tesfaye tweeted the artwork, track list, and finally the free download link to his second set, Thursday.  Demand overwhelmed and crashed the website.

What is all the hype about?  How good does a 21-year-old singer have to be in order to bypass the traditional channels of music distribution and gain such a following?  Well, as of this writing, House of Balloons is currently the top rated release of the year on metacritic.com, and Complex magazine’s pick for the best album of 2011 (so far).  Clearly, the answer is phenomenal.  The biggest obstacle facing the R&B singer’s second release is the massive anticipation that has built around the strength of its predecessor.

The obvious question on the mind of every fan of the The Weeknd is, “how does Thursday stack up to House of Balloons?”  It’s a fair question, and we’ll get to it.  After all, Thursday has been marketed as the middle entry of a trilogy starting with Balloons and ending with the future release, Echoes of Silence.  The similarities are certainly here, obvious from the outset; the cover art for both mixtapes features the same (ironically) retro template.  Both are comprised of nine songs each – the same number visible on an iPod screen at one time.  And most importantly, the music on Thursday is the logical evolution of that found on House of Balloons.

“Lonely Star,” the opener, makes it abundantly clear that Tesfaye is not trying any Kid A-style musical leaps.  The same dark, menacing synthesizers and drum machines that fueled Balloons are back in full force.  Yet, while Thursday retains the slow, sedated feel of its predecessor, there is more of a detectable aggression permeating the disc, most likely the result of Tesfaye’s newfound Internet stardom.  Nights filled with anonymous sex and consequences-be-damned drug use still define Tesfaye’s lyrics, but the singer is no longer inviting his female companion along for the ride.  He’s telling her.

Like Balloons, Thursday’s best tracks are numbers four and five, titled “The Zone” and “The Birds (Part 1),” respectively.  “The Zone” features the album’s best grab-all-of-your-attention-if-you-hadn’t-been-paying-enough-of-it lyric, when The Weeknd tells said female companion that he’ll “be making love to her through you.”  The album’s only guest feature (and the only one on a release from The Weeknd so far) comes as a surprise as the listener thinks the song is winding down, when suddenly Drake (who else) jumps in to spit one of the most fast-paced and vivid verses of his career.  The most memorable hook on Thursday follows shortly after, on “The Birds (Part 1),” when The Weeknd warns his girl “don’t make me make you fall in love with a n**** like me.”  In an era when rappers have made promiscuity out to be more and more like a talent, The Weeknd paints his as an addiction, a disease.

The rest of the disc finds Tesfaye seeking and frequently succeeding to re-capture the moments that make House of Balloons the masterpiece it is.  There are the brooding, “Great Gig in the Sky”-in-2011 wordless vocal cries over synthesizer swirls, followed by the drum machine crescendos that kick the listener in the gut as his mind is set to drift off into another dimension.  There are the double- and triple-layered harmonies that help put The Weeknd up there with Trey Songz, The-Dream and Ne-Yo as the best male R&B vocalists in the business.  And there are of course those beautiful melodies that put the rest of the game’s to shame.

Is Thursday as good as House of Balloons?  House of Balloons keeps getting better with every new listen, and Thursday is no different, so it wouldn’t even be right to answer the question within 48 hours of Thursday’s release.  No, the question that Thursday leaves you with is, why does The Weeknd party on Thursday more than every other day of the week?  Other than this unexplained mystery, there is little to question about Thursday.  Except this: with music this good available legally for free, how are other artists getting away with charging anything for theirs?

The Weeknd – Thursday by The_Weeknd

The Weeknd – The Morning (ill-esha’s lovestep jam) by ill-esha

4.5 / 5 bars