With their new collaboration “Poison,” which was unveiled on Friday (Dec. 17), Aaliyah and The Weeknd give fans something deceptively sweet to devour.
The track, which debuts ahead of Aaliyah’s posthumous studio album anticipated at a later date via Blackground Records 2.0 and EMPIRE, features the Princess of R&B and the Dark Prince of R&B.
The Weeknd sampled Aaliyah’s top 20 Billboard Hot 100 hit “Rock the Boat” from her 2012 compilation album Trilogy on “What You Need.” When The Weeknd’s breakthrough 2011 House of Balloons mixtape was launched on streaming sites this spring to mark its 10th anniversary, fans were eventually able to hear the original sample.
However, House of Balloons wasn’t the only collaboration between these two superstars to make it onto digital service providers(DSPs) recently. Aaliyah’s uncle and Blackground Records founder Barry Hankerson spoke with Billboard this summer about how he and EMPIRE collaborated to put Aaliyah’s entire catalog on streaming for the very first time. Following her death in an aircraft accident on Aug. 25, 2001, when she was only 22 years old, much of Aaliyah’s music has been left off DSPs for more than a decade.
Since he mentioned Drake, Future, Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, and Snoop Dogg in the Billboard interview, Hankerson indicated that The Weeknd wouldn’t be the only superstar on the forthcoming album of new Aaliyah music.
