belly and the weeknd should
drop a rap album at some point

After Hours> MDM> Trilogy

Not gonna lie I started typing out a whole thing and it was gonna be way too long so I’m gonna condense it

Echoes is his best imo
The songwriting is only paralleled by kiss Land - cohesive narrative and just very well crafted both in terms of structure and lyrics.
Production on echoes is the best imo. House of Balloons is often too reliant on heavy drops that almost act as shock value, Thursday production Is nuts but often is overwhelming to a fault.
Echoes finds a balance between the two that fits perfectly. Songs like Initiation and The Fall have that overwhelming claustrophobic feel of Thursday but still let the vocals take the front seat. Something like XO/The Host bends genres in a far more natural way than some of the stuff on HOB.
It’s also his strongest vocal performance - his vocals took too much of a backseat on Thursday and some songs on HoB don’t really utilize the extent of his ability.

Thursday is so f***ing raw. I’m perfectly happy for people to put HoB above it and I did until like literally last week. But the production is much more interesting that HoB which already had great production and it really just throws all the more generic elements of HoB like song structuring, pop melodies etc out the window. It’s also a much more self aware release than HoB to me. Rolling Stone, The Birds, Lonely Star all find a great balance between the depravity and this spiral of self destruction. For me HoB rotated between these successfully but on Thursday it felt like he managed to do them more on one song than across songs.

My issues with House of Balloons are a lack of cohesion for one. High for this into what you need then into HOB/GTG is really questionable structuring imo. Same with Party into Coming down into loft music. I also find that there’s a pretty big dissonance between the highs and the lows of the album - more so than on any of the other tapes, something like loft music is massively weaker than HOB/GTG and it shows.

That being said i can’t argue with any ranking they’re all f***ing great

Also this still ended up being long as s*** my bad

Blonde

HoB > After Hours > EoS > MDM> Thursday

Trilogy are all classic bro it's no touching them but Mdm and after hours are fire top to bottom. After hours been on repeat for the past few weeks

Tough one, on a day to day basis im listening to AH/MDM much more often, but if i could only ever listen to one ever again then defo Trilogy

Half of Thursday is his best work but the other half is kissland level garbage

KTT stays disrespecting Trilogy like it aint a perfect project. Only KL can compare and thats only to one of the mixtapes. All 3 combined are untouchable

trilogy > mdm > after hours

Privilege always gets me in the mood, nothing on trilogy and AH can compare.

all of them amazing but HOB alone >>.
HOB
AF
MDM
EOS
Thursday

facts, there seems to be this new narrative brewing lately saying “trilogy wasn’t all that lol yall need to get over it and accept the new s***”

like yea ofc the new stuff’s amazing, but it still doesn’t come nowhere near Trilogy which is a perfect 10/10 project

Nah this was great, makes me wanna go back and take a deeper listen to all three tapes.

All valid points thanks for this

Why are we acting like Beauty behind the madness doesn’t exist. It’s his second best tape

because losers and the ed sheeran song are tha worst weeknd songs of all time

only losers go to school

If MDM was longer, it would probably be a tie with Trilogy

Yup

I can’t really compare Trilogy and After Hours, IMO at least.

After Hours is top of his game Weeknd where the vocals and production are extremely refined, while Trilogy is him working with what he had at the time creating this atmospheric music and laying down the groundwork for who “The Weeknd” is.

2 songs lol the HIGHS are better than most of The albums you mention tbh

Please tell me this bait

It really isn’t. How can you say not. It still had a Trilogy vibe but more pop in a sense but still hard af. His new s*** is cool I guess.