So hearing impaired users used to frequent the forum, interesting

First song I ever “liked” on SoundCloud

It would be insane. I actually thought he was gonna make an album full of this cause this felt so much like the culmination of Trilogy and Balloons imo

Hell yeah. Too bad Kiss Land didn't sell enough, and it stressed him/ made him doubt himself.
Maybe he thought an album with songs like this wouldn't sell very much -- and one album not selling is enough, two would be too much for his pride; or even his agreement with the label.

(Even though Kiss Land debuted at n.2 on Billboard, which is no small feat for a debut major label album, but oh well, why worry/wonder, 10 years have passed)

This avant-­R.&B. was a hit with critics, but it didn’t always translate into commercial appeal. Tesfaye’s first major-­label album of original material, ‘‘Kiss Land,’’ came out in 2013. It was a Technicolor version of his mixtapes, full of long, fluid, semistructured, absorptive songs about desire and suspicion, but it sold only 268,000 copies, and none of the several singles the label pushed to radio took hold. His fervent fan base remained steady — when he toured, they filled arenas for him — but the Weeknd was a superstar act only inside his own universe.

 

Stymied, he turned to Wendy Goldstein, the head of urban A&R at Republic, for advice. ‘‘The underperforming of that record in his own expectations of what it was supposed to do shook him to his core,’’ she says. ‘‘I said, ‘You wanna be the biggest in the world?’ He said, ‘I absolutely wanna be the biggest in the world.’ ’’ She and the newly malleable Tesfaye got to work. First, she arranged for him to record the duet he would perform with Ariana Grande at the A.M.A.s, ‘‘Love Me Harder.’’

archive.ph/yUPQj

^ archive link to bypass the paywall
(JULY 27, 2015) Can the Weeknd Turn Himself Into the Biggest Pop Star in the World?

shoulda kept OG cover on streaming