Tesfaye’s music has become a symbol of hedonism pushed to bleak excess, with a series of albums-including 2015’s Grammy-winning Beauty Behind the Madness, 2016’s multiplatinum Starboy, and 2020’s dense and atmospheric After Hours-whose narrators can’t seem to say no even if they hate themselves for it later. Ethiopian by heritage (his parents immigrated to Canada in the late ’80s, just before he was born), Tesfaye-out from behind the mask of making art online-has since come to represent the changing face of Toronto, rooting himself not just in an international musical community but in a specific diasporic experience. One of the earliest musicians to find his footing on the internet, Tesfaye originally offered his music through YouTube and free downloads, a move that felt radical then but is common now.
The brainchild of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, the project took off in 2011 with a string of mixtapes (later collected as 2012’s Trilogy) that forged cavernous, falsetto-driven R&B with narratives drenched in drugs, sex, and other regrettable decisions-a sound both sensuous and detached, featherlight and dead heavy. Even the singer’s sunniest tracks (“Can’t Feel My Face,” “Starboy”) feel anchored by darkness-the sense that pleasure is pain and beauty decays and you can’t have the night without the morning after. Nobody makes feeling bad sound as good as The Weeknd.
