Video will appear as you scroll through the story
The Weeknd · S2 E1
The Upload
Three songs appear on YouTube from an account with no face, no bio, and no name anyone recognizes
December 2010. Someone uploads three songs to YouTube under the name xoxxxoooxo, and the voice is so haunting that thousands of strangers spend the next three months trying to figure out who it belongs to.
Massive Attack, Teardrop (1998). The trip-hop blueprint that lives inside every second of House of Balloons. A haunting vocal over minimal, atmospheric production, designed to make you feel like you are hearing something private that was never meant to leave the studio. When Abel started layering reverb and chopped samples in late-night Toronto sessions, this is one of the ghosts in the room.
Teardrop, Massive Attack (1998)
Built on a slowed-down harpsichord loop and Elizabeth Fraser's otherworldly vocal, "Teardrop" strips R&B and electronic music down to their most vulnerable core. The production barely moves, letting space and silence do the heavy lifting. That same principle, restraint as atmosphere, quiet as intensity, became the foundation of the sound Illangelo and Doc McKinney built with Abel in those late-night Toronto sessions. Listen for how the beat never pushes forward. It hovers. House of Balloons would do the same thing three years later.
TAP TO REVEAL: Who actually built the sound behind those anonymous uploads?
Parkdale, Toronto
The neighborhood on Toronto's west side where Abel and the XO crew were living during the creation of those first tracks. Cheap rent, all-night sessions, and a community of artists grinding in total obscurity.
Coming Down
The deep cut from House of Balloons that never became a single but captures the atmosphere of those first uploads better than almost anything else. Over a warped, looping guitar sample, Abel delivers one of his rawest vocal performances: intimate, unstable, completely uninterested in making you comfortable.
Coming Down, The Weeknd (2011)
Read the lyrics while you listen. The words reveal how Abel was already writing about obsession and self-destruction in those earliest anonymous uploads, setting the tone for everything that followed.
Which of these was NOT one of the three songs The Weeknd originally uploaded to YouTube in late 2010?
One of the three uploads, a slow-burn seduction called "What You Need," starts circulating faster than the others. Next: the song that turned anonymous listeners into obsessive believers.
0 XP earned this session