Initially released for free on the internet, House of Balloons emerged in a haze of anonymity for a few months, nobody really knew if the Weeknd was a “he” or a “them.” Tesfaye eventually claimed credit for the project, and put out two more mixtapes before 2011 was up: Thursday and Echoes of Silence. The best Weeknd songs are dizzy from this dance between the sacred and the profane. Even in his introductory handshake with the pop world, he wasn’t concerned with making nice: “This ain’t no fuckin’ sing-along,” he cooed on “Crew Love,” “So, girl, what you singing for?” Tesfaye’s voice has a pure, angelic tone - he sometimes sounds like a long-lost Jackson sibling - and the great, illicit thrill of his music comes from hearing this heavenly instrument sing about, say, debauched sex and coke lines on glass tables. But most people first heard Tesfaye on another higher-profile album that came out that year, Drake’s Take Care, on which the Weeknd was by far the least famous person with a credited feature. Since his brooding, deliciously depraved debut mixtape, 2011’s House of Balloons, the 25-year-old Toronto-based Tesfaye has presented himself as a defiantly unsentimental crooner. If you’ve heard any Weeknd song other than the star-making summertime smash “Can’t Feel My Face,” none of this should come as a surprise. It wouldn’t be any clearer if he were wearing a black hat. “This ain’t the right time for you to fall in love with me,” Tesfaye will warn with a bluesy swagger a little later in this record, The Beauty Behind the Madness, but by then we’ve gotten the message: This guy is bad news, baby. The video offers no narrative explanation as to why he does this - I guess we’re supposed to assume that he’s the kind of guy who’d shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. At some point, another person approaches Tesfaye draws his gun without effort and shoots them down.
As he finishes the job and strides through the desolate landscape in step with the song’s slurry, slow-motion pace (“Tell Your Friends” sounds, somehow, like if “Benny and the Jets” were a Drake song), the camera looks up at him from his feet, like he’s a larger-than-life antihero in a John Ford movie. In his new video for “Tell Your Friends,” Abel Tesfaye - better known as the Weeknd - buries a man alive against a desert horizon at dusk.
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