The Weeknd

#1In 2012, The Weeknd played Coachella.

#2It was his first major U.S. performance, and by then the strange thing had already happened: his music was famous before he really knew how to be famous himself.

#3Only a year earlier, listeners had barely known what The Weeknd looked like. Now people had come to a California festival specifically to see him.

#4Abel Tesfaye came away thinking the performance had gone reasonably well.

#5Then he watched the footage.

#6He hated what he saw.

#7The music sounded like it belonged to a fully formed star—dark, cinematic, dangerous. The person standing onstage didn't yet look like the performer Abel imagined in his head.

#8He read comments too. The gap became impossible to ignore.

#9So Abel went to his agent with a request.

#10Book more shows.

#11Not a handful. He later remembered doing roughly a hundred that year.

#12This was a strange solution for someone whose career had been built on hiding. Instead of retreating from the thing he was bad at, he decided to do it over and over in public.

#13But that raises another question.

#14Why had one of music's fastest-rising new artists spent so much time hiding in the first place?

#15For that, you have to go back to a teenager leaving a Toronto home with a mattress.

#16Abel Tesfaye was born in Toronto to Ethiopian immigrant parents.

#17His parents separated when he was young, and he grew up mainly with his mother and maternal grandmother. His mother worked multiple jobs. His grandmother spent so much time caring for him that Amharic, not English, was his first language.

#18His father was largely absent.

#19Abel later remembered only scattered encounters with him as a child. But it's too easy to take that fact and turn it into an explanation for every dark relationship or self-destructive character he would later write about.

#20What we do know is that by his teens, Abel was drifting away from school.

#21After trouble at one school, he transferred. He didn't last long there either.

#22Eventually, he and his friend La Mar Taylor dropped out.

#23Then they decided to leave home.

#24Years later, Abel still remembered hauling mattresses outside and loading them into a friend's van. He remembered the way his mother looked at him—as if she believed she had somehow failed.

#25He left anyway.

#26And according to Abel, that departure eventually supplied the name.

#27They left one weekend and didn't really come back.

#28The Weekend became The Weeknd, with the spelling altered because another Canadian act was already using the original name.

#29It wasn't born as the polished brand name of a future superstar.

#30It came out of a teenager leaving home.

#31The life waiting outside wasn't glamorous.

#32Abel lived with friends around Toronto's Parkdale neighborhood, including the apartment at 65 Spencer Avenue that would later become part of Weeknd mythology.

#33Money was scarce.

#34There was welfare, unstable housing, couches, drugs, and the kind of choices people make when they're trying to get through another day with very little structure around them.

#35Abel later called drugs a crutch during that period.

#36A lot of the imagery that would eventually fill The Weeknd's music—parties that stop feeling fun, sex without intimacy, intoxication turning into emptiness—resembled the world he was living in.

#37But there wasn't yet a clear plan to turn any of it into a career.

#38His early music wandered.

#39He worked under other names, spent time around a songwriting and production circle known as The Noise, and made demos that could sound far more conventional than the music people would soon associate with The Weeknd.

#40Then, around 2010, he began working with producer Jeremy Rose.

#41Their collaboration later became contentious. Rose argued that he had helped push Abel toward the darker R&B approach that defined some of the earliest Weeknd material, while people in Abel's camp disputed the extent of his claims.

#42The safest version is also the most interesting: Rose was part of the early formation, but he wasn't the lone inventor of The Weeknd.

#43Early versions of songs that became "What You Need," "Loft Music," and "The Morning" emerged around this period.

#44After Abel and Rose split, producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo became central to shaping the sound that listeners would actually hear on "House of Balloons."

#45Abel wasn't passive in that process.

#46He kept pushing music slower, stranger, moodier. Beautiful samples could sit underneath lyrics that were cold or vindictive. Dreamy sound and ugly behavior occupied the same room.

#47That contrast would follow him for years.

#48First, though, hardly anyone knew who was making the songs.

#49Near the end of 2010, three songs appeared online.

#50"What You Need."

#51"Loft Music."

#52"The Morning."

#53The artist name was The Weeknd.

#54There wasn't much else.

#55No normal introduction. No obvious face. Not even enough information for some listeners to know whether The Weeknd was one person or a group.

#56Looking backward, the mystery can seem like an ingenious marketing campaign.

#57Abel's own explanation is messier.

#58He was camera-shy. He didn't like the way he looked in photographs. He didn't want his face out there.

#59So he used other images instead.

#60The anonymity wasn't born entirely from a master plan.

#61Then people reacted to it.

#62The less they knew, the more they wanted to know. They listened to the songs, then searched for the person behind them.

#63Once Abel saw that the mystery had power, he kept it alive deliberately.

#64What began partly as insecurity became strategy.

#65There was a moment when the split between Abel Tesfaye and The Weeknd became almost absurd.

#66Abel was working at American Apparel.

#67The Weeknd's music started playing in the store.

#68His coworkers could hear the singer.

#69They just didn't realize the singer was standing there working beside them.

#70Online, The Weeknd was becoming a name.

#71Offline, Abel could still disappear in plain sight.

#72That arrangement wasn't going to last.

#73Toronto's most powerful new music circle was beginning to listen.

#74The story often gets compressed into one sentence:

#75The Weeknd uploaded music, Drake found it, and everything changed.

#76Drake mattered enormously.

#77But there were people in between.

#78La Mar Taylor, Abel's old friend, remained part of the project. Oliver El-Khatib, one of the people building OVO around Drake, became an important link as the music circulated through Toronto.

#79The songs appeared through the OVO ecosystem.

#80Then Drake started publicly championing The Weeknd.

#81At the time, that kind of attention was enormous. Drake was no longer just a Toronto rapper doing well. He was becoming one of the biggest artists in the world.

#82The spotlight accelerated everything.

#83But Drake didn't create The Weeknd from nothing.

#84By the time the light hit, there were songs, producers, a visual language, a name, a mystery, and a small group of people already building the world around Abel.

#85Drake made far more people look.

#86In March 2011, The Weeknd released "House of Balloons" for free.

#87It exploded.

#88"Thursday" followed. Then "Echoes of Silence."

#89Within one year, Abel had released a trilogy of mixtapes that made The Weeknd one of the most talked-about new artists in R&B without following anything close to the normal path.

#90He also became closely involved with Drake's "Take Care."

#91Material connected to Abel ended up in songs such as "Crew Love," "Shot for Me," and "The Ride." Abel later acknowledged that he had been hungry enough for the opportunity to let significant material go into Drake's album.

#92But he didn't simply become a Drake artist.

#93Instead, Abel kept building XO with people from his own circle.

#94La Mar Taylor—the friend who had left school and home with him—was still there as the project grew.

#95The music had caught up to Abel's ambition.

#96Abel himself hadn't yet caught up to the music.

#97That's what the Coachella footage exposed.

#98The Weeknd had found a shortcut that came with a hidden cost.

#99Traditional performers might spend years playing small rooms, gradually figuring out how to hold an audience as the venues get larger.

#100Abel had become mysterious and important online first.

#101His records could sound huge even while he was still learning what to do onstage.

#102So after watching himself at Coachella, he chose repetition.

#103He toured relentlessly. He took dance lessons. He kept putting himself in rooms where he had to get better.

#104Later, he said one of his fears was being remembered as someone who could have been great.

#105He wasn't satisfied with having a successful record.

#106He wanted the human being onstage to become as convincing as the character in the songs.

#107Over time, the rooms got larger.

#108But once live performance stopped being the obvious weakness, another problem emerged.

#109The Weeknd was influential.

#110He wasn't yet the kind of pop star whose songs belonged to everybody.

#111In 2013, Abel released his first studio album, "Kiss Land."

#112It reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

#113Calling it a disaster would be ridiculous.

#114But it also didn't produce the giant crossover moment that might have been expected after the cult excitement around the mixtapes.

#115Abel later described that period as creatively difficult.

#116He had poured enormous amounts of material into the three mixtapes and contributed to Drake's work. Then he suddenly found himself traveling the world and trying to make an album on tour.

#117He hit writer's block.

#118He also admitted that he could be stubborn, resistant to outside input, and unsure of exactly what he was trying to make.

#119"Kiss Land" showed him something useful.

#120Making a singular record and making a song that millions of strangers instantly want to sing are not the same skill.

#121So once again, Abel moved toward people who knew how to do what he couldn't yet do.

#122This time, one of those people was Max Martin.

#123Abel never actually wanted to remain an underground secret forever.

#124Even early on, he talked about wanting to become a star.

#125The question was how to get there without flattening everything that made The Weeknd interesting.

#126One important opening came through Ariana Grande's "Love Me Harder."

#127For Abel, working on that song did more than put him beside another major singer. He later described the collaboration as a kind of ticket into the room with Max Martin.

#128Martin had spent decades building enormous pop records.

#129Abel wanted access to that knowledge.

#130They didn't immediately operate the same way.

#131Abel wanted records to feel like his world. Martin had his own deeply tested instincts about melody and structure.

#132They pushed against each other.

#133Then, in 2015, came "Can't Feel My Face."

#134On the surface, it was almost shockingly bright for The Weeknd.

#135The rhythm invited Michael Jackson comparisons. The chorus landed instantly. It sounded designed for radio in a way the early mixtapes never had.

#136For fans who loved the claustrophobic darkness of "House of Balloons," it could look like Abel had surrendered to mainstream pop.

#137But the shift was subtler than that.

#138He kept pushing the record toward a moodier feeling. The song itself wasn't suddenly innocent either.

#139He hadn't thrown out the darkness.

#140He had learned how to place it inside a melody that almost anyone could enter.

#141That was the breakthrough.

#142"Can't Feel My Face" reached No. 1 in the United States.

#143"Beauty Behind the Madness" turned The Weeknd from an influential R&B figure into a mainstream pop star.

#144Then came "Starboy."

#145By now the anonymity was gone.

#146The Weeknd had become intensely recognizable—hair, clothes, videos, recurring characters, carefully designed eras. The man who once benefited from nobody knowing what he looked like had built one of pop's clearest visual identities.

#147Then, at the end of 2019, he released "Blinding Lights."

#148It sounded almost euphoric.

#149Fast synths. A huge pulse. An unmistakable 1980s pop vocabulary.

#150Yet the person inside the song is lonely, driving through the night, desperate for someone else to make him feel whole.

#151It was a perfected version of an old Weeknd trick.

#152Make the surface irresistible.

#153Put something much less comfortable underneath it.

#154The song, made with collaborators including Max Martin and Oscar Holter, didn't just become a hit.

#155It refused to go away.

#156Radio played it. Streaming platforms kept serving it. It became enormous across countries. A TikTok dance challenge gave it another form of circulation, but no single platform explains what happened.

#157"Blinding Lights" spent 57 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100's Top 10 and 90 weeks on the chart overall.

#158Billboard later ranked it as the No. 1 Hot 100 song of the 21st century for its 2000–2024 calculation.

#159In 2025, it became the first song on Spotify to pass five billion streams.

#160Ten years earlier, Abel had been able to stand inside a clothing store while his own coworkers listened to The Weeknd without recognizing him.

#161Now one of his songs had become nearly impossible to escape.

#162Then came another image of how far he'd traveled.

#163In 2021, The Weeknd performed the Super Bowl halftime show.

#164The man who once watched his own Coachella footage and thought he wasn't good enough was now standing on one of the biggest stages available to a musician.

#165That should have been the clean ending.

#166Instead, the story turned.

#167In September 2022, The Weeknd was performing at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.

#168Tens of thousands of people were there.

#169Soon after the show began, Abel's voice failed.

#170He couldn't continue.

#171He stopped the concert and apologized to the crowd, telling them he couldn't give them the show he wanted to give.

#172At first, it looked like a straightforward physical problem.

#173Years later, Abel described it differently.

#174At the time, he was trying to run a stadium tour while also deeply involved in making the HBO series "The Idol."

#175He was overloaded.

#176He later connected the loss of his voice to a panic attack.

#177It would be too neat to say that this was the exact second he decided to kill The Weeknd. He didn't.

#178But it became hard to ignore the symbolism.

#179Abel had spent more than a decade building a voice, a character, and an identity called The Weeknd.

#180Then, while performing as that character at stadium scale, the voice simply stopped coming out.

#181Around the same time, the line between Abel and his creation was becoming harder to manage.

#182"The Idol" was supposed to be another expansion.

#183Abel wasn't just providing songs or making a cameo. He was a co-creator and executive producer, and he played the central character Tedros.

#184The production became troubled. The creative direction changed dramatically. Large portions were reworked.

#185When the series arrived in 2023, the critical response was harsh, and it ended after one season.

#186Abel initially defended it aggressively.

#187By 2025, his tone had changed.

#188Looking back, he described "The Idol" as half-baked.

#189That mattered because music had trained Abel to expect an extraordinary degree of control.

#190He had built XO, controlled eras and visuals, shaped albums as entire worlds, and eventually scaled those worlds into stadium productions.

#191Television and film didn't bend to him in quite the same way.

#192And during this same period, another question kept becoming louder.

#193Did he still want to be The Weeknd?

#194The Weeknd had solved a problem for Abel.

#195It gave a camera-shy young man somewhere to hide.

#196It let him write an exaggerated, uglier, more destructive character without asking the public to treat every lyric as a literal confession from Abel Tesfaye.

#197It became a vehicle powerful enough to carry him from anonymous uploads to global stadiums.

#198Abel himself used that word: vehicle.

#199But eventually he also described it as something closer to a prison.

#200The public knew what The Weeknd was supposed to be.

#201Albums came with expectations. Characters came with expectations. Fans came with expectations.

#202The identity that once created distance between Abel and the public became so enormous that the distance started disappearing.

#203Beginning publicly around 2023, Abel started talking about ending The Weeknd.

#204By 2025, "Hurry Up Tomorrow" was presented as the final album under the name.

#205Even its structure seemed designed to close a loop, circling back toward the beginning of "House of Balloons."

#206It was almost too perfect.

#207A teenager leaves home for a weekend.

#208That departure becomes The Weeknd.

#209The name travels through fifteen years of music, drugs, fame, pop hits, stadiums and breakdowns.

#210Then Abel closes the circle and returns to being himself.

#211Except that's not what happened.

#212In August 2026, Abel was performing in Stockholm when he brought up the retirement idea again.

#213This time, the message had changed.

#214He told the audience that he'd tested the idea of retiring The Weeknd.

#215He didn't like how it felt.

#216The identity that had once seemed like something he needed to escape suddenly wasn't so easy to discard.

#217So the story doesn't end with the familiar line about an artist removing the mask and finally becoming his true self.

#218Abel hid behind The Weeknd.

#219Then The Weeknd became bigger than Abel.

#220Then Abel wanted out.

#221And when he moved close enough to actually imagine life without it, he reconsidered.

#222Maybe the important question isn't which one is the real person.

#223Maybe it's whether Abel Tesfaye and The Weeknd can still be separated cleanly at all.

#224By 2026, Abel didn't seem to have a final answer.

#225His tour schedule did.

#226In September 2026, the tour reaches Belluna Dome in Japan.

#227In October, it moves to Goyang Stadium in Korea.

#228The name on the bill isn't Abel Tesfaye.

#229It's still The Weeknd.

#230The teenager who once didn't want people looking at his face now performs in front of tens of thousands of people.

#231The young singer who watched his Coachella footage in 2012 and decided he wasn't yet great enough now headlines stadiums.

#232And the name that began with a teenager leaving home with La Mar and a mattress is still traveling with him.

#233At first, it gave him somewhere to hide.

#234Then it became a name the whole world knew.

#235Eventually it grew large enough to feel like a prison.

#236He tried to end it.

#237And in 2026, the name is still glowing above the stage.

#238The Weeknd.

#239Before Drake helped expose The Weeknd to a much larger audience, the unknown Abel had actually been making music that could end up with Drake. A few years later, they were close enough that Abel let significant material flow into "Take Care"—yet he never became an OVO artist, choosing to build XO with his own circle instead. The two Toronto stars would keep leaving fingerprints on each other's music while moving in and out of proximity.