Given its title, I couldn’t resist spending today’s post on The Weeknd’s amazing new mixtape, Thursday. While a few other blogs could very well be doing the same thing today, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say few of them can claim the following fun fact: The very first You Hear That post was about The Weeknd’s first mixtape, House of Balloons. It’s true — hearing that album made me get off my blogger laurels and start writing about music. Clearly House of Balloons struck some inspirational chord for me, but when I stop to think about it, that connection is somewhat bizarre. The dark vignettes that Abel Tesfaye’s songs sketch are genuinely creepy to me, and R&B has never been my wheelhouse. So why am I drawn to his music? What does it meeeean?!? I think the connection may stem from the fact that The Weeknd’s creepiness seems profoundly honest to me. So many artists glorify the drug-addled club scene, but songs like “Life of the Party” make it sound as scary as it probably is in real life. Can you imagine listening to these songs while performing the acts they describe? Wouldn’t that be wildly depressing? I don’t mean to suggest he makes public service announcements, just that he’s the documentarian of something that people normally write fiction about. To me, that’s fascinating, and I can see why Drake was so quick to jump on Tesfaye’s bandwagon. Check out “Life of the Party” below, along with the rest of Thursday, and download the whole thing for free here.