Weeknd Full Album

[Alacoque Whitchurch]

Thediscography of Canadian singer-songwriter The Weeknd consists of five studio albums, nine extended plays, three mixtapes, four compilation albums (including three greatest hits albums) one live album, 75 single releases (including 21 as a featured artist), and 13 promotional singles (including two as a featured artist). According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), The Weeknd has accumulated 18.5 million certified album units and 113 million certified digital single units in the US, based on sales and on-demand streaming, as of January 2024.[1][2]

The Weeknd released three mixtapes in 2011: House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence, the first of which was certified silver in the UK.[3] He signed with Republic Records in 2012, and released Trilogy, a compilation album of the three mixtapes he had released the previous year plus three new bonus tracks.[4][5] Trilogy peaked within the top five on albums charts and was certified multi-platinum in Canada and the US.[6][7] The album spawned three singles, all of which were certified platinum or more in the US: "Wicked Games", "Twenty Eight", and "The Zone" (featuring Drake).[8] His debut studio album, Kiss Land, reached number two on the albums charts of Canada and the US.[6][7]

In 2014, The Weeknd released a collaboration with Ariana Grande titled "Love Me Harder" and the single "Earned It", in which the latter was recorded for the Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack, with both singles becoming top-ten entries on both the singles charts of Canada and the US.[9][10] His second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness, released in 2015, reached number one of the albums charts of Australia, Canada, Sweden, the UK, and the US respectively.[6][11][12] Supported by the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "The Hills" and "Can't Feel My Face", the album has sold over one million copies in the US and 3.6 million copies worldwide as of 2017. "The Hills" has been certified 11 Platinum in the US.[8] The Weeknd also found success with his features on the singles "Might Not" by Belly in 2015 and "Low Life" by Future in 2016, as well as Beyonc's 2016 song, "6 Inch".

The Weeknd released his third studio album, Starboy, on November 25, 2016. The album peaked atop the charts in Australia, Canada, Denmark, New Zealand, and the US.[6][7][11] It was supported by the international top-ten singles "Starboy", "I Feel It Coming", and "Die for You", the former two of which feature the duo Daft Punk and peaked atop the singles chart and has received diamond certifications in France.[13][14] The former and latter singles both reached number one in the US and all three singles also received multi-platinum certifications in Australia, Canada, Sweden, and the US, with the album's other singles also obtaining moderate success.[15][8] In 2017, The Weeknd found success with his features on the singles "Some Way" by Nav, "Lust for Life" by Lana Del Rey, and "A Lie" by French Montana, the latter of which also features Max B. In 2018, he released a collaboration with Kendrick Lamar titled "Pray for Me" for the Black Panther soundtrack, with the song receiving multi-platinum certifications in Canada and the US.[15] Later that year, he released his debut extended play My Dear Melancholy, which spawned the Canada number-one single "Call Out My Name".[9] In 2019, The Weeknd found success with his features on the singles "Price on My Head" by Nav and "Wake Up" by Travis Scott.

On March 20, 2020, The Weeknd released his fourth studio album, After Hours. The hit single, "Blinding Lights", reached the top in Canada and the US and broke the record for the most weeks in the top five (43), top ten (57), and top 100 (90) of the Billboard Hot 100 at the time of its release, and finished 2020 as the year's top Billboard Hot 100 song.[16] The song was later ranked as the No. 1 Greatest Hot 100 Hit of All Time by Billboard.[17] After Hours peaked atop the albums charts of multiple countries including Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Sweden, the UK, and the US,[6][7][11] and also spawned the US number-one and Canada top-ten singles "Heartless" and "Save Your Tears".[9][10] Later that year, The Weeknd found success with his collaboration with Ariana Grande on the song "Off the Table". In 2021, he released a collaboration with Post Malone titled "One Right Now", which debuted and peaked at number six on the Billboard Hot 100.

On January 7, 2022, The Weeknd released his fifth studio album, Dawn FM. The lead single, "Take My Breath", which was released on August 6, 2021, debuted and peaked at number six of the Billboard Hot 100 in the US. Other singles, achieving moderate success of their own from the album include "Sacrifice", "Out of Time". Later in the year, The Weeknd released a collaboration with Metro Boomin and 21 Savage titled "Creepin'", which debuted and peaked at number one in his home country of Canada and reached number three on the Hot 100. In 2023, he released a collaboration with Travis Scott and Bad Bunny titled "K-pop", which debuted and peaked at number seven on the Hot 100. Very shortly after, he also found success with his feature alongside Swae Lee on the song "Circus Maximus" by Travis Scott. In 2024, he released a collaboration with Future and Metro Boomin titled "Young Metro", which debuted and peaked at number nine on the Hot 100.

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hrte mich denn aus der Engel

Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nhme

einer mich pltzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem

strkeren Dasein. Denn das Schne ist nichts

als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,

und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmht,

uns zu zerstren. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Below are translations of the portion of the opening of the first elegy quoted by The Weeknd from three of the most well-known and respected translations of Rilke. You can check out these books in the footnotes.

The Weeknd is an interesting guy. He doesn\u2019t drop an album and leave it all on the record: he shows up bloodied, in bandages, with fake plastic surgery, and with artificially aged skin and gray hair during performances and live engagements. His public persona acts as a kind of poetic restatement of the themes of his work.

In an interview with Variety, The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, explained the impetus behind this performance art, saying \u201CThe significance of the entire head bandages is reflecting on the absurd culture of Hollywood celebrity and people manipulating themselves for superficial reasons to please and be validated.\u201D Tesfaye the man, rather than The Weeknd the performer, strikes me as someone who is committed to art in a way that transcends the role traditionally played by musicians.

Recently released Dawn FM, The Weeknd\u2019s fifth full-length record, is a concept album, which is kind of like the project book of the music world. The album has a more rigid conceptual backbone than most records do, and knowing that concept deepens your engagement with the music. Dawn FM is configured as a radio station that plays in purgatory while one waits for their eternal fate. In an interview with Billboard, Tesfaye described it this way:

Picture the album being like the listener is dead. And they\u2019re stuck in this purgatory state, which I always imagined would be like being stuck in traffic waiting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. And while you\u2019re stuck in traffic, they got a radio station playing in the car, with a radio host guiding you to the light and helping you transition to the other side.

The interesting thing is that the translation doesn\u2019t exactly correspond to any one of the most popular translations of Rilke\u2019s work. Did he translate it himself? He is trilingual, though German isn\u2019t one of the languages he\u2019s fluent in. The mystery deepens! Let\u2019s take a closer look.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels\u2019 order?

Even if they pressed me against their heart, I\u2019d be consumed

For beauty is the terror we endure

While we stand and wonder, we\u2019re annihilated

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875\u20131926) was a Austrian German-language poet whose writings continue to be immensely popular and powerful today, thanks to his enduring quotations, often favored by so-called \u201Cnew age\u201D thinkers, frequent pop culture quotations, and the posthumous publication of his wise and moving Letters to a Young Poet, which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of letters Rilke wrote to a young fan and novice poet between 1902 and 1908.

Rilke achieved that rare feat of popularity both during his lifetime and after. Ulrich Baer, Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and English at NYU, is recognized as one of the foremost Rilke scholars, and attempts to account for Rilke\u2019s enduring popularity and quotability this way: \u201CRilke is one the few writers who gives us something like the very essence of poetry, which is to cast deeply felt emotions in highly resonant and memorably rhymed verse.\u201D

In the context of The Weeknd\u2019s afterlife-themed album in which terrestrial things are celebrated one last time before falling away into the eternal, Rilke is a good fit because of the poet\u2019s own preoccupations: the big stuff. Baer puts it this way:

Rilke thought that only two experiences get us close to the authentic nature of our existence: love and death, experienced as loss. Poetry can console by capturing loss in ways that seem to give the painful absence a place in time, which the poem represents via the wave-like pattern of rhymed speech. Poetry does not let us \u201Cget over\u201D loss but shows how to integrate loss into existence without letting us become overwhelmed by it.

Probably through The Weeknd\u2019s co-writer: composer Oneohtrix Point Never, otherwise known as Daniel Lopatin. In a 2020 Rolling Stone article, director Nate Boyce relates a story about how Lopatin offered him a copy of one of Rilke\u2019s Letters to a Young Poet (which he refers to as \u201CFear of the Inexplicable\u201D) when they were shooting the music video for \u201CNo Nightmares,\u201D a Oneohtrix Point Never track featuring The Weeknd.

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