The Weeknd
A voice that hid its face in the dark of night and sang in falsetto, as if making a confession.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people beside him ⏳🌊
- FamilySamra Tesfaye
The mother who raised him on her own, passing down the faith and language of the Ethiopian immigrant community.
- ColleagueLa Mar Taylor
A childhood friend and longtime creative director who stood by him from his years of obscurity.
- PatronageDrake
A fellow Toronto-born star who brought his music to the world during his early years of obscurity.
- ColleagueMax Martin
A Swedish producer who has co-created many of his biggest popular hits since 2015.
- FriendshipBella Hadid
- InfluenceBillie Eilish
An artist of the younger generation, credited with finding success on a current carved out by darker-toned predecessors like The Weeknd.
I. The boy from Scarborough · 1990–2008
(Immigrants) He was born in February 1990 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, as Abel Makkonen Tesfaye. His parents were Ethiopian immigrants who separated when he was a baby. (Grandmother) He was raised in Scarborough, on Toronto’s east side, by his mother, Samra Tesfaye, and his maternal grandmother. He had almost no contact with his father, and money was tight. Amharic was spoken at home, and he is said to have spent his childhood within the traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. (Leaving home) Around the age of seventeen he dropped out of high school and left home. With Lamar Taylor, a friend since childhood, he lived in a one-room apartment in Parkdale, scraping by on odd jobs. The night streets he would later sing about were the very streets he walked in those years. (By ear) He had no formal musical training. Instead, he played records by Michael Jackson, Prince and Aaliyah over and over, shaping his voice on his own. His signature style — a low murmur that suddenly soars into falsetto — grew out of habits he taught himself in this period.
II. A voice without a face · 2009–2011
(Anonymous) Around 2010 he posted a handful of songs to YouTube without revealing who he was. No name, no face — only a voice drifting out from behind an account. (Mixtapes) In 2011 alone he released three mixtapes for free: “House of Balloons,” “Thursday” and “Echoes of Silence.” Their sound — dark, distorted synths, indie-rock samples and a restrained falsetto — was unlike anything in the R&B idiom of the day, and critics began calling it dark R&B. (Drake) Drake, a fellow Torontonian, featured his music on his blog and announced him to the world. Without that backing, an anonymous voice with no name would hardly have drawn attention so quickly. (Stage name) His moniker was originally “The Weekend,” but because a Canadian band was already using the name, he dropped one “e” from the spelling and became “The Weeknd.”
A track from his unknown days on “House of Balloons,” it shows his early idiom, in which love and self-destruction are tangled together.
- Opening in a low, sunken voice and then suddenly leaping into falsetto in the chorus, the song draws its whole emotional range from that moment.
- An indie-rock guitar sample blends with slow-tempo synth pads to create a dreamy texture that was unfamiliar in the R&B of the time.
- As the chorus repeats, a raw, almost hoarse desperation creeps into the voice — said to come from an unpolished vocal recording close to a single take.
III. Debut, and the leap · 2011–2015
(Record deal) In 2012 he signed with Republic Records and made his official debut with “Trilogy,” which gathered the three mixtapes. The songs he had once given away were reissued to commercial success, and the following year he released his first studio album, “Kiss Land.” (Unease) “Kiss Land” captures the isolation of sudden fame and the exhaustion of life on tour. Its commercial reception was cautious, but it endures as an uncensored record of his state of mind. (Max Martin) The turning point came in 2015 with “Beauty Behind the Madness.” Teaming up with the Swedish producer Max Martin, he dressed dark R&B in the grammar of pop. Falsetto vocals in homage to Michael Jackson met synth-pop arrangements, and “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills” both reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart. (Shadows) Commercial success aside, his lyrics remained steeped in drugs, loneliness and distrust of love. Critics noted that the more famous he became, the darker the persona he put onstage.
His first major hit to embrace the grammar of pop, made with Max Martin, it is marked by the contrast between dark lyrics and a bright melody.
- A light falsetto reminiscent of Michael Jackson carries the whole song.
- The funk guitar riff and buoyant synth-pop rhythm sound bright on the surface, in sharp contrast to the dark mood of the lyrics.
- The short hook repeated in the chorus shows a pop construction built with radio play in mind.
A counterpart on the same album to “Can’t Feel My Face,” it is a signature song portraying the isolation behind the glamour.
- A low synth bass drives the entire song and forms the backbone of its ominous atmosphere.
- In the chorus, multitracked vocals stacked in layer upon layer create an overpowering sense of space.
- A wordless, hummed interlude serves, paradoxically, to heighten the song’s tension.
IV. The peak, and love · 2015–2020
(Starboy) On 2016’s “Starboy” he collaborated with the French duo Daft Punk. Daft Punk’s trademark synths and vocoder textures seeped into the title track and “I Feel It Coming,” pushing his sound into a broader, more futuristic space. (Romance) His private life soon became material for his albums. (Melancholy) “Call Out My Name” is regarded as a song that holds both the resentment and the lingering attachment of a breakup. (Influence) His dark, dreamlike early sound left its mark on the later course of R&B.
A song that represents the period when his sound expanded through his collaboration with Daft Punk.
- The synth riff repeated from the intro immediately reveals Daft Punk’s signature mechanical texture.
- A light vocoder effect on the vocals creates a voice somewhere between human and machine.
- In the chorus the rhythm section suddenly thins out, leaving open space — a structure that keeps the song from wearing thin on repeated listening.
A track from “My Dear Melancholy,” it captures the feeling of heartbreak in a restrained idiom.
- Early in the song, a low, murmuring voice over a dry guitar arpeggio creates a mood close to resignation.
- Toward the end the vocals grow more and more intense, and as they soar into falsetto it feels as though a dam of emotion has burst.
- An arrangement built more on acoustic instruments than electronics typifies the restrained tone of the whole album from this period.
V. After Hours · 2020–2022
(Bandages) Throughout the promotion of his 2020 album “After Hours,” he appeared on television and in music videos with his face wrapped in bandages, as if after plastic surgery — a character that served as a metaphor for the self-destruction hidden behind glamour. (Blinding Lights) The lead single, “Blinding Lights,” a reimagining of 1980s synth-pop, stayed near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for more than a year after its release, setting one of the longest chart runs in history. (Super Bowl) For the 2021 Super Bowl halftime show he drew headlines by adding $7 million of his own money. Its staging — a stage enclosed by mirrors and backup dancers with bandaged faces — became the most widely talked-about performance of his career. (Dawn) In 2022 he released “Dawn FM,” attempting the form of a concept album set in an afterlife guided by a radio DJ. The actor Jim Carrey took part as narrator, adding to the buzz.
The signature song of After Hours and a long-running fixture on the charts, it stands at the peak of the era symbolized by the bandaged character.
- The synth riff of the intro quotes 1980s synth-pop outright and defines the identity of the whole song.
- Drum programming that hits hard on the second and fourth beats (the backbeat) forms the skeleton of a groove that sets the body moving.
- The passage where his voice soars nearly an octave in the chorus is the point that shows off a vocal power he reproduces intact even live.
- In the music video, a bloodied, bruised face and the night streets of Las Vegas·Los Angeles smeared with neon light complete the song's mood visually.
VI. The voice, and a farewell · 2022–2025
(Losing his voice) In September 2022, his voice suddenly gave out in the middle of a U.S. concert, and he had to stop the show. Nearly three weeks later he resumed the tour with a concert in Toronto, and the canceled show was held again that November. (The Idol) In 2023, the HBO series The Idol, which he co-created and starred in, was savaged by critics and ended after a single season. (Ethiopia) Around the same time, he kept making large donations to areas of his ancestral homeland, Ethiopia, struck by famine and conflict, working on relief efforts alongside the World Food Programme and others. It was a rare instance of his openly showing a sense of debt to his roots. (Retirement announcement) In 2025, releasing the album Hurry Up Tomorrow, he announced that with this album he would lay to rest the name and character of 'The Weeknd.' His declaration that he would return to his birth name, Abel Tesfaye, meant he was taking off, by his own hand, a mask he had worn for more than fifteen years.
A track from Hurry Up Tomorrow, the last album released under the name "The Weeknd," it is steeped in the feelings of a man on the eve of retirement.
- The low, sunken opening gives the impression of a return to the dark textures of his early House of Balloons days.
- In the chorus, layer upon layer of stacked voices reveals, in many folds, the inner life of a figure left alone.
- The arrangement, filled with nothing but restrained synths and bass, sounds like a final intention to win on the voice itself, without any lavish stagecraft.
Lesser-known stories
Early in his career he deliberately kept his face hidden. Even after House of Balloons became a sensation, for a while the rumors spread on his voice alone, without a single photo or a single interview. This anonymity, it is said, was less a strategy of mystique than the circumstance of an unknown young man who was not yet ready to bear fame. His stage name was originally 'The Weekend,' but to distinguish himself from a Toronto band of the same name that was already active, he dropped one e from the spelling, arriving at the form we know today. That single letter, trivial as it seems, became the proper noun that would go on to define his identity. He himself later revealed in interviews that, before he became famous, he made a living for a time working at an American Apparel store in Toronto. He would later mention the hardship of those days directly in interviews as well. In April 2021 he personally announced that he was donating one million dollars (about 2 million meals) to the World Food Programme for the hungry in the conflict-stricken areas of Ethiopia's Tigray region, and he urged others to join him. Quite apart from any grand retirement announcement, such gestures toward his roots continued steadily.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Falsetto (false voice)
One theory holds that falsetto comes from the Italian falso ('false'), meaning a 'fake' voice pitched higher than one's real range. It is a singing technique in which a man produces notes above his natural range in a thin, light tone. Think of the sound a friend makes in choir class when, unable to reach the low notes, he mock-sings them in an affected high voice.
Mixtape
A blend of the words mix and tape, it originally meant an unofficial recording made by stringing several songs together. It refers to an unofficial album distributed for free, without a formal record deal. Like the mix tape you once made for a friend, recording only the songs you loved, it is a format that allows freer experimentation than an official album.
Synth-pop
A blend of synthesizer (an electronic instrument that produces synthesized sounds) and pop. It refers to pop music built around electronic sounds made on synthesizers instead of guitars or drums. It is easy to grasp if you imagine the bleeps of a game console used as the accompaniment to a song.
Concept album
An album planned so that the songs on it connect through a single story or theme. It is like a comic book whose every scene is different, yet which ultimately follows one plot.
Trap
A hip-hop subgenre characterized by rapid-fire hi-hats (a cymbal percussion instrument) and heavy, low bass. Picture the rapid strikes of bullets fired in a burst in a video game, and you will be close. In English, trap means a snare, so the word is also used for hunting or for a pitfall.
Vocoder
A blend of voice (vocal) and an encoding device (coder). It means a device, or the effect it produces, that electronically modulates the human voice so it sounds like a robot. Think of the mechanical voice of a robot speaking in a cartoon or film, laid over a human song.