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The Weeknd · S4 E1
Kiss Land
The concept: fame is a foreign country, touring is a horror film, and Abel is lost in both
2013. Abel Tesfaye lands at Narita Airport for the first time, and the customs officer does not recognize the face behind the passport. Three mixtapes have made him the most talked-about voice in R&B, but in Tokyo, he is nobody.
Kavinsky, Nightcall (2010). The synthwave anthem from the Drive soundtrack, co-produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk. A dead man calling his girlfriend through cold synths and pulsing drum machines, set against neon-soaked nighttime streets. When Abel started building Kiss Land, he was pulling from cinema as much as from R&B: the same neon isolation, the same sense that a city can be beautiful and hostile at once.
Nightcall, Kavinsky (2010)
Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk co-produced this track, and his fingerprints are everywhere: the vocoder splitting the difference between human warmth and mechanical coldness, the bassline pulsing like a heartbeat under concrete. Kavinsky built the concept around a dead man calling his girlfriend from beyond the grave, desire transmitted through a barrier that cannot be crossed. That same tension between intimacy and distance became the emotional engine of Kiss Land. Listen for the moment the female vocal enters and the temperature drops: that handoff from warmth to ice is exactly what Abel would spend the next year trying to capture.
A Horror Movie for the Ears
Abel has called Kiss Land "a horror movie," and he means it literally. He wanted every track to feel like a score to a film you shouldn't be watching alone. The Japanese horror aesthetic runs deep: distorted faces on the artwork, claustrophobic production even in wide-open arrangements, and a vocal performance that sounds like someone narrating his own disappearance.
“I called it a horror movie because it was the vibe of my experience. Going to these foreign cities for the first time... there's something sexy about the foreign, but something really scary about it too.”
— Abel Tesfaye, Complex cover story, August 2013
Roppongi, Tokyo
The neon-lit entertainment district where Abel spent his first nights in Japan. Roppongi's collision of nightclubs, karaoke bars, and 4 AM convenience stores became the visual language of Kiss Land.
TAP TO REVEAL: Why is the album called Kiss Land?
Adaptation, The Weeknd
The opening track of Kiss Land begins with a voicemail from a woman and unfolds into Abel processing what fame has done to his relationships. He revisits the girl from the mixtape era and realizes he has become someone she cannot recognize. It is the thesis statement for the album: you can leave home, but at some point home also leaves you.
Adaptation, The Weeknd (2013)
Abel opens Kiss Land by cataloging every way success has warped his closest relationships. The voicemail that starts the track sets the tone: someone is trying to reach him, and he is already gone. Follow the lyrics as the production swells around them.
Which three filmmakers did Abel cite as influences on Kiss Land's aesthetic?
Kiss Land has a sound, a concept, and a world. But one track on the album will ignite a public conflict Abel never saw coming: he samples Portishead's "Machine Gun" without permission, and Beth Gibbons is not happy about it.
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