BBTM is perhaps the most slandered Weeknd album - tied with Starboy...

And while the overall body of work is at times, quite a mixed bag, lets not forget how f***ing insane the singles were for this album

EASILY his best singles EVER across his career - Blinding Lights has nothing on any of them

TELL YOUR FRIENDS

OFTEN

IN THE NIGHT

CFMF

Literally four 10/10 records

Tell Your Friends cracks my top 5 Weeknd - one of the greatest beats I've ever heard and Abel absolutely skates across it

Not to mention the aesthetic vision of the music videos that interlinked each of these records

BBTM has some of the greatest pop singles of the 2010s

how the f*** u aint even mention The Hills

Real thread tho

It's my fav pop album by him. The biggest songs of his career are in this album, can't forget that

How tf did I forget The Hills

EASILY his best singles EVER across his career - Blinding Lights has nothing on any of them

Opinions over statistics, of course

• FIVE 10/10 SINGLES

I've said this from the jump

BUT IF YOU REMOVE THE TRACKS ON BBTM WITH FEATURES ON

IT BECOMES A FLAWLESS BODY OF WORK

Singles were insane

I think people underestimate the magic of creating five singles as good as these were essentially backtoback

Retrospectively, this run is f***ing insane

He really went with the whole Hollywood Satanic Illuminati theme on this album

classic album his best pop album

Real Life
Tell Your Friends
Often
The Hills
Acquainted
Can't Feel My Face
Shameless
Earned It
In The Night
As You Are
Angel

It's definitely a tighter listen, still some weak songs on this though (Real Life, Shameless, Acquainted, Angel)

Acquainted is another damn near 10/10 song for me slander will not be tolerated

And I personally love Angel as an outro, is a pure ballad

But yeah trimming the features strengthens the project A LOT

I really only feel like they were there because the label pushed them to be

Yup.

It’s especially cool since this was his break thru mainstream album

Tell Your Friends, Often, The Hills, back to back to back this mans discography insane

its the most slandered among hardcore fans but that's balanced out by the love it gets from casuals. most non-weeknd stans I know really love it and rate it as his best album. It's my least favorite album of his but a lot of that is tied up in the fact that I had certain expectations after trilogy and kiss land that bbtm didn't meet. it can be hard to separate the context from the content sometimes.

Tbh the Hills is like The Weeknd’s stronger, or maybe blinding lights is 🤔. Anyway I just feel like it’s extremely overrated.

Yeah it was Top 500 of all time and they placed it at 442. Definitely appreciate this era a lot more now that time has passed.

Tell Your Friends was also not a single from BBTM lmao Acquainted was...

Also not including the biggest hit out of all of them in OP?? crazy

It's funny that you mention it being well balanced/sequenced, as my initial complaint when it released was that it lacked the cohesion of the mixtapes and kiss land. it had a little bit of everything, and Abel himself even admitted that it was a bunch of tracks thrown together without much regard for a continuous mood or concept. the visuals were impressive and he still did some artistically interesting things but considering we initially expected a d***gy grunge album produced by doc, it was a big adjustment to have a bunch of Max Martin produced pop-singles. I will always see this album negatively because it replaced what could have been one of his best projects. this dramatic shift is a big reason I don't like it as much but by now I've adjusted to thinking of Abel as a pop artist so the pop songs don't bother me as much on later projects.

But didn't we hear about the scrapped d***gy grunge album after BBTM was released?

I think it's unfair to criticise it as "it could have been something else" - you could apply that phrase to any album really, sure it COULD have been something else

Trilogy & KL are for sure my favourite Weeknd projects and some of my favourite bodies of work in music period, but another 'drugged out' dark album just sounds like more of the same (in the context of the time) and if he released that body of work his career may have stagnated

It's a shame BBTM does have quite glaring shortcomings, I think , as my original post alludes to, the rest of the album was as quality as the singles it'd probably be universally considered a classic as well as one of the most successful transitions to pop music made by anyone post-200s

His best album

more info came out after release but in the months following kiss land he said he would record his next album in Seattle and began posting a lot of pictures with doc, promising next level music.

I totally agree that it's an unfair criticism. by me saying that, I'm more trying to acknowledge that I (and probably a lot of others) dislike it because it signifies a fork in Abel's career. while you're right that continuing with the same sound would eventually get boring (however I don't think the doc album would've been the same exact sound), the fact that he had no misses pre-bbtm makes us somewhat unconsciously assume that if he hadn't gone pop, the quality of music would have stayed at trilogy/kiss land level. therefore there's a lot of "what if" surrounding 2014/15. for me personally, the what if isn't as bad since the release of MDM/AH, as it seems he's found the sweet spot between pop appeal and interesting cinematic albums.