I honestly think a lot of it has to do with the context of the original tapes before they were combined into Trilogy . The Toronto sound that came from primarily him and Drake was brand spanking new . The genre is flooded with their influence now , so it doesn ' t exactly seem like anything special . The music matched The Weeknd ' s image at the time , dark and mysterious . Nobody had seen the guy , he didn ' t do live shows , didn ' t do interviews . I mean shit , you can probably find articles from 20102011 where journalists referred to him as a group . There were so many Who is the Weeknd ? articles . Nobody knew a thing about The Weeknd aside from the fact that he makes this novel music . He just began to pop up on the OVO blog . It was quite interesting and caught a lot of people ' s attention .