House Of Balloons (2011)

The Weeknd · 2011 · 50 min

The Weeknd's House of Balloons began as a free nine-track download on March 21, 2011. It was the first of the three mixtapes he released that year, followed by Thursday and Echoes of Silence. The debut's history is unusually tied to its files: the original mixes and samples became an explicit part of the tenth-anniversary reissue. Universal Music's announcement confirms both the original giveaway and the restoration of that version in 2021.

The sequence runs from “High for This” to “The Knowing,” with two-part titles built into the middle. Those paired titles are part of the original nine-track structure, rather than separate songs added later. The original-version tracklist is a useful reference for identifying it.

The download offered here preserves the nine original giveaway files in the archived official package. Archival checksums and audio verification are documented below.

Selected edition: Original nine-track official giveaway ZIP, preserved by the Internet Archive from the documented source. 9 audio files, 161,804,665 bytes and 49:36 of measured audio.

Verification: Official historical ZIP captured by Wayback; independent CDX payload SHA-1; pinned local ZIP SHA-256 and size; member CRC and size; full audio decode; every torrent piece. The seedbox copy matched every file’s SHA-256 and every torrent piece; all files passed public HTTPS range, length and byte checks. The house client verified the complete payload and is seeding it.

Nine MP3 files from the original official artist giveaway ZIP, preserved in a Wayback capture before the 2012 commercial Trilogy remix. The entire package matches the independent Archive CDX payload SHA-1. Every file passes complete decoding and every torrent piece verifies.

Source limits: MP3 is lossy; this is the original distributed digital edition, not a lossless master; The CDX digest is an archival checksum, not an artist-published checksum. No human comparative listening is claimed.

These are source and file checks; no comparative listening assessment is claimed.

Source declaration: Artist/DJ-issued free promo; copyright retained. Source evidence.

Hosting this entry was approved by the owner on October 6, 2026. The source declaration remains unchanged.