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The Weeknd · S3 E3
Echoes of Silence
The third and most cinematic mixtape. A cover of Michael Jackson closes the trilogy
December 21, 2011, the longest night of the year. A third free mixtape drops on the same website that hosted the first two, and the most prolific anonymous run in modern music is complete.
Bon Iver, Holocene (2011). In the same year Abel was building dark cathedrals of sound in Toronto, Justin Vernon was making music that felt equally isolated, atmospheric, and impossible to categorize. Both records shared something critics struggled to name: the feeling that you are listening to someone alone in a room, building a world entirely from their own solitude.
Holocene, Bon Iver (2011)
"Holocene" builds from a fingerpicked guitar into layered harmonies that sound like a choir singing from the other side of a mountain. Justin Vernon wrote it in a bar in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and it captures the same paradox that defines Echoes of Silence: overwhelming loneliness made beautiful through production. Listen for how the drums enter midway, not with force but with patience, filling space the way Illangelo's synths fill Abel's tracks.
The Darkest Tape
Echoes of Silence is the most cinematic of the three mixtapes. Where House of Balloons was raw and chaotic, and Thursday was conceptual and claustrophobic, this one unfolds like a short film: tightly paced, visually evocative, designed to be consumed front to back without pausing. It opens with a Michael Jackson cover so bold it borders on reckless.
TAP TO REVEAL: How much did Abel earn from 27 songs in 2011?
Which Memphis rap legend features on Echoes of Silence?
Montreal, The Weeknd
"Montreal" is the second track on Echoes of Silence and one of the most purely cinematic songs from the entire mixtape era. The production swells and recedes like a film score, and Abel's voice floats above it all with an eerie detachment that makes you feel like you are watching a scene unfold from a distance.
Montreal, The Weeknd (2011)
Read the lyrics while you listen. The words capture the restless, cinematic quality of Echoes of Silence, with Abel painting scenes of distance and desire that feel like watching a film unfold in real time.
Twenty-seven free songs, three mixtapes, nine months. The trilogy is complete. But one track on this tape changes everything: Abel opens Echoes of Silence with a Michael Jackson cover, and nobody is ready for that level of ambition from a 21-year-old.
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