I don’t know who The Weeknd is (are?), and until this afternoon I’d (not quite) never heard of him (them?) – turns out he’d been hiding in a couple of unexplored corners of my RSS feeds while getting ready to drop a startlingly good free album/mixtape. With the name being unfamiliar, I mostly ignored the first few posts about the release of House Of Balloons this morning, but when something is being talked about by both 2dopeboyz and Discobelle (and nearly every other blog in my newsfeed) I figure maybe I ought to pay attention.

As it turns out, The Weeknd make some rather remarkable R&B.  Lyrically and vocally, this is pretty conventional fare for the genre, inviting comparisons to early Ginuwine and hanging out in and around slow jam territory. Conventional, however, is not a word I’d use to describe the Beach House and Siouxsie Sioux-sampling production, which is as much Ready For The World (the group) as it is “Ready For The World” (the song).  This is a record that would certainly be more groundbreaking in a world in which How To Dress Well didn’t already exist but, as a music nerd who has as much affection for The-Dream as I do for Teen Dream, it’s also a record that pushes a whole lot of my buttons.

House Of Balloons is available for free over at The-Weeknd.com.