FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Music

Five Thoughts From The Weeknd's Listening Party Last Night

We accidentally touched him on the butt, but he didn't seem to mind.

On November 13th, the Toronto-based R&B dude The Weeknd will release Trilogy, his first studio album. To celebrate the record, his label Universal Republic held a listening party at a high-end club called The Double Seven Lounge in Manhattan's West Village, and he'll be performing three shows in New York City this weekend. I attended the party, and came away with exactly five thoughts on the matter.

Advertisement

1. The Record Itself
As its title implies, Trilogy is simply a collection of songs from The Weeknd's first three mixtapes: House Of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes Of Silence. The big draw here is that the mixtape songs are now sequenced differently, and they've been remastered. There are some new tracks, but we weren't privy to them. I will say, however, that the songs do sound a lot better in remastered form. This might have been because of the club's mind-blowing soundsystem, or his label Universal Republic might have actually gotten someone to go in there and mess with the levels to make the songs sound better. If that's true (and the only way we'll know is when we get to hear the actual record), that's really amazing. Mixing seems to be a nearly ineffable art, and whoever can determine which combination of levels is going to be the best, especially when people can't consciously determine good mixing, is probably a wizard. Anyways, this record is probably meant to be a stopgap to buy The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye, some time while he works on his proper major-label debut.

2. The Club
You have to hand it to Universal Republic—The Double Seven Lounge is pretty much the perfect place to hold a listening party for The Weeknd. Words such as "dark," "bacchanalia" and "drugs" have been used to describe Tesfaye's music, and the atmosphere The Double Seven Lounge actively pushed those vibes onto the party's attendees. Basically everything in the club was all-black, and the waiters serving drinks and hors d'oeuvres were all walking in time with the music, which was goofy and made it hard to walk while they were in front of you but whatever. Nothing can ascribe a sense of sexiness to an inanimate object like the color black can, and when everything in your club is black it can be fairly sexy, if a little bit hard to tell when you're about to leave the sunken dancefloor and go up some steps to the bathroom. Also, I later looked the club up on Yelp and it had four dollar signs next to it.

3. The Drinks
There was a conditional open bar at last night's Weeknd listening party—all of the drinks were free, as long as you wanted something with Hennessey in it. The tradeoff was that all of the drinks had ridiculously goofy names, so if you ordered one you ran the risk of having to say phrases like, "I'd like one 'The Sports Icon,' please." Obviously, if you're a poor music writer it's worth it but I have no idea why anyone other than like ten of the people there would have ordered a Henny and Ginger that had been redubbed as "The Artist."

4. The Crowd
As a four-dollar-signs-on-Yelp ass club, The Double Seven had no idea what they were getting themselves into by hosting a music industry event. I would say the vast majority of people in the crowd were "industry people," which means label people, musicians, journalists, and people who just kind of show up to photoshoots and stand around handing out business cards to people. Some music industry things can be like those nightmarish "networking events" like this one, but last night's party was pretty cool. Mainly, people were just trying to maintain a sense of calm because The Weeknd was there. Which leads me to… 5. The Weeknd Himself
The presence of Abel Tesfaye at his own party was cause enough for roughly a hundred people to go to a club they normally wouldn't have been able to go to, drink liquor they don't like and listen to songs they already heard, which is objectively impressive. People have said so much shit about Tesfaye it's astonishing—I've heard rumors that he never leaves his hometown of Toronto because he's addicted to drugs, he suffers from anxiety and stagefright, he doesn't actually exist, etc. etc. etc. And it turns out that the rumors are pretty much bullshit, because the Abel Tesfaye I saw was gregarious, gladly chatting with pretty much whoever would come up to him, seemingly chilled-out and sober, and completely a tangible human being. I know that last part because we were sitting in back-to-back booths. He was sitting on top of the couch, his feet on the seat, so that his butt was basically at my shoulder level. At one point in the night, I leaned back, spread my arms out, and accidentally touched The Weeknd's ass with my elbow. He didn't seem to notice, and if he did, he didn't care.

@drewmillard