Trilogy cover

Trilogy

Released

A cheat, but a beautiful one. His first three albums—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—cronched together and reissued by the Republic cyclotron. The sound of the hollow bones, the benzodiazepine in the champagne room, the heartbreak submerged beneath pharmaceutical ice—this is Abel Tesfaye’s Weeknd. He samples Siouxsie and the Cocteau Twins, and his mash feels genuinely intense, like something that happened behind a series of increasingly heavy doors. What puts him at the literal top of pop music is his voice, a light and hard head voice, the sound of someone forgetting and remembering everything at the exact same time.

Sasha Frere-Jones

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