His early, digital-only collections also got an official release as the budget-priced Trilogy, introducing his sexy, narcotized lullabies to co-eds who would later tweet him selfies.

2 on the Billboard 200, his first studio LP was tepid by comparison two years later, it’s hard to conjure anything except a vague aural hallucination, like brownout flashbacks of doing body shots at a dive bar.

Even though his 2013 major-label debut, Kiss Land, debuted at No. “They worked from scratch instead.”Ī wise move for someone who glorifies bad decisions: His self-released 2011 mixtape trilogy ( House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence) of twists and turns down a lube-greased rabbit hole worked to cement a relatively new genre - dubiously christened “PBR&B” - and he, the permanently unhappy, luscious-voiced king of it. “Martin’s team presented Tesfaye with a selection of prewritten material, and he rejected it all,” wrote Jon Caramanica in a rare, intimate interview with Tesfaye for the New York Times. Tesfaye would appear to know who he is and what he needs so well, in fact, that he threw out all the material brought to him by producer Max Martin, whose Top 40 song skeletons have resuscitated careers that didn’t even know they were in need of saving. On Beauty Behind the Madness, his fifth full-length release (but only his second studio album), he’s also got an idea of his best future self, whom he thinks can be this generation’s Michael Jackson or Whitney Houston. With such astute lyrics - perhaps his most self-aware to date - the bedroom-weary 25-year-old can’t be accused of not knowing his audience, which on his last tour comprised a theater full of 18-year-olds with XO tattoos and their chaperones gleefully watching him project NSFW film clips of the aforementioned activities. the dreadlock-pompadour’d, perpetually blue-balled and lovelorn singer the Weeknd, on the Kanye West-produced “Tell Your Friends,” backed by loose-limbed jazz pianos from peak- College Dropout or Late Registration. “I’m the nigga with the hair / Singin’ ’bout / Poppin’ pills / F–kin’ bitches / Livin’ life so trill.” So sings Abel Tesfaye, a.k.a.

The weeknd losers vevo