House of Balloons and Other Emergencies
The week House of Balloons dropped was also the week the Beastie Boys made everyone lose their minds again, which meant that spring 2011 felt like an embarrassment of riches if you were paying attention to music. Six records worth noting, give or take.
Katy B’s On a Mission was the one I kept arguing with myself about. The London girl with the reputation had been building toward this for a while, and half of it lands exactly right—that dubstep-touched warmth she carries so naturally. The other half dissolves into ordinary pop that forgets she’s interesting. Fifty-fifty feels generous, honestly, but the good half is genuinely good.
Abel Tesfaye, recording as The Weeknd, put out House of Balloons as a free mixtape, and whatever Def Jam was doing at that moment, it wasn’t listening. This was R&B that felt like it had been up for three days straight—blurred, humid, unapologetically sexual. The production catches you in that half-asleep state where everything feels heavier than it should. I put it on late and felt things shift around in my chest that I’d been pretending weren’t there.
tUnE-yArDs’ W H O K I L L requires a specific tolerance for chaos—Merrill Garbus layering voice and ukulele and drum loops into something that sounds like it shouldn’t cohere but somehow does. Demanding music. The reward for the effort is an unconventional trip through textures that most people making pop records aren’t brave or eccentric enough to attempt.
Frank Ocean’s Nostalgia, Ultra was the other free release that week, and Def Jam’s silence on this one was even more baffling—Ocean was already signed to them and they still couldn’t hear what was in front of them. He was deep inside Odd Future then, which gave him a certain underground credibility, but Nostalgia, Ultra stood entirely on its own: slow-burning, soul-heavy, full of a confidence that didn’t need to announce itself.
The Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee, Pt. 2 drops you straight back into the New York they came from—the 80s version, all swagger and bounce. They hadn’t released anything in years, and the return felt earned rather than nostalgic. It simply goes. Hard to argue with that.
And then Snoop with Doggumentary, his eleventh album, which is honestly an eleven-albums-in kind of record. The Doggystyle era isn’t coming back, and by 2011 the David Guetta slime had gotten into everything. Snoop can’t avoid it entirely here. But no one else carries that flow—no one—and even when the production fails him, he moves through it with an ease that reads as genetic. I’ll love him through every bad era. That’s just the deal.