its one of the better songs on after hours for me but top ten? nah maybe in my top 50 or 60

I don’t think abel has 60 good songs to begin with

It wasn't ever really about his vocal range or voice, it was about the dichotomy between the dark lyrics and the vocal range of the person singing the songs. At least that was the aesthetics to the first 3 mixtapes was.

It was considered to be underground because before the weeknd in early 2010's there wasn't much going on in the alternative R&B side of things.

The production is apart of the appeal to the original weeknd. Like if you took for instance the morning's instrumental and you told me you don't like it I'd say you're hard of hearing.
Sometimes through the mixtapes the production added to the lyrics. Such as the beat switch in house of balloons to glass table girls adds to the song by connecting the story going on in the lyrics (and really across the mixtapes as a whole) to the beat/production change.

The song writing. Now without breaking down each part of the song writing I'll focus on 2 parts. The lyrics, and the use of his voice as an instrument. For the lyrics it could be all kinds of things I think it's mostly due to the themes being presented to the audience across the mixtapes. For the 2nd part you could probably classify this as his melodies, but I'm thinking of examples where the weeknd just holds notes or sings without singing words. This is something that wasn't really found in much of the mainstream at the time. Or even just things like sing-rapping was very new, It's how a song like headlines by drake gets put into an R&B box even tho it's just a song where drake is singing his raps. The weeknd also dips into this box and I think that combined with the production is why at the time you could draw many lines between the 2.
The thing that you're really missing op is the timing of the weeknd. He came in at a time where R&B was getting stale.

Then theres also the mystery, which as time as shown isn't possible to really keep up much.

pnd stans touch themsleves while hating on the weeknd im convinced

The dude is a serious bottom-feeder. I’ve rarely seen somebody post so frequently which such little insight.

He has referenced many times about how he is in his late 20’s too. I sincerely hope that isn’t true; because not only is his demeanour that of a child, his general level of intellect is that too.

I remember back in the OG section we had Goliath-level posters like Thrice/OG Thoth verbally obliterating users, and people with genuine hook-ups leaking snippets and s***.

Now the best we have to offer are posters like “FLOPNEXTDOOR” and “KAPGOD” who can’t formulate coherent sentences without the use of emojis or unoriginal images.

Gone out the f***ing saddest.

Oh you're a fan of THETRASHNEXTDOOR

Makes sense now

He's a visionary trapped in the life of a chart-topping sensation.