The Weeknd, the singer who could not bring himself to retire his own mask

The Weeknd

Photo: Brian Ziff / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 16, 1990 Toronto, Canada
Occupation	Singer, songwriter, record producer
Known for	Uncut Gems, Lemonade, Taylor Swift: The 1989 World Tour – Live
Awards	4 Grammy · Canada's Walk of Fame Allan Slaight Honour

For most of his career, Abel Tesfaye has talked about The Weeknd the way a novelist talks about a character who has outlived the book. The name began as a mask worn by a teenager in Toronto, who uploaded songs to YouTube with no face and no biography attached. It grew into one of the most-streamed acts in pop, and for the second half of that run its owner kept announcing its funeral. Then, on a stadium stage in Stockholm this summer, he told the crowd he had tested retirement and did not like the way it felt.

He grew up in Scarborough, on the eastern edge of Toronto, the only child of Ethiopian immigrants, raised by his mother and grandmother after his parents separated. Amharic was his first language, and he has said that its tone and the Ethiopian singers playing at home, Aster Aweke among them, shaped the vibrato that would later carry his falsetto. At seventeen he left school and moved into an apartment in Parkdale with friends, one of whom, La Mar Taylor, is still his creative director.

The anonymity was a tactic rather than shyness. Tesfaye, born on February 16, 1990, started posting songs online in 2009 and in 2011 co-founded the XO label with Taylor and the managers Wassim “Sal” Slaiby and Amir “Cash” Esmailian. That year XO gave away three mixtapes, House of Balloons, Thursday and Echoes of Silence: songs about narcotic late nights, built on sampled indie rock, sung in a voice that owed more to Michael Jackson than to anything else in R&B at the time. Republic Records signed him and repackaged the tapes as Trilogy in 2012. Kiss Land, his first studio album, followed in 2013 and reached number two on the Billboard 200.

The move into the mainstream came through a film soundtrack. “Earned It”, written for Fifty Shades of Grey, won him the Grammy for Best R&B Performance and an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song. Beauty Behind the Madness (2015) opened at number one on the Billboard 200, produced the chart-toppers “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills”, and won the Grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album. Starboy (2016), made partly with Daft Punk, won the same category again. In 2018 he recorded “Pray for Me” with Kendrick Lamar for Black Panther and released My Dear Melancholy,, a short, bruised EP.

After Hours (2020) is the record that changed his scale. Its visual campaign, a red blazer and a face that grew more bloodied and bandaged with every appearance, borrowed openly from cinema, and its single “Blinding Lights” became the best-performing song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 and the most-streamed song on Spotify. He headlined the Super Bowl LV halftime show in February 2021. The album opened a trilogy completed by Dawn FM (2022), framed as a radio broadcast from purgatory with Jim Carrey as the host, and Hurry Up Tomorrow (2025), which debuted at number one with 490,500 units in its first week.

The same peak produced his most public fight. When the nominations for the 63rd Grammy Awards were announced in November 2020, After Hours received none. Tesfaye called it a “sucker punch” and, in March 2021, said he would no longer let his label submit his music, blaming the Recording Academy’s anonymous review committees. His fourth Grammy, for Best Melodic Rap Performance, arrived anyway in 2022, as a guest on Kanye West‘s “Hurricane”. The boycott ended with a surprise performance at the ceremony in February 2025. His label resumed submissions, and Hurry Up Tomorrow received no nominations at all.

His screen ambitions have been harder to defend. The Idol, the HBO series he co-created with Sam Levinson and starred in opposite Lily-Rose Depp, arrived in 2023 after a Rolling Stone report on its troubled production and was met with widely negative reviews. He later conceded that its story “could have been told in a different way”. The film companion to Hurry Up Tomorrow, directed by Trey Edward Shults with Jenna Ortega, took $7.6 million against a $15 million budget, and IndieWire placed it among the worst vanity projects ever made. Both asked audiences to read the persona’s darkness as confession, and both suggested that the mask works better at stadium distance than in close-up. The crisis behind his retirement talk was smaller and more human: in August 2022 he lost his voice early in a show at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, and he later said it had been a panic attack.

The tour that grew out of the postponed After Hours dates has become the longest chapter of his career. The After Hours til Dawn Tour opened in Philadelphia in July 2022 and set the record for the highest-grossing tour by a male solo artist. In 2026 it played six consecutive nights at the Stade de France, five at Wembley Stadium and an Asian leg through Tokyo, Singapore and Hong Kong. At Kai Tak Stadium in October he premiered “Hong Kong”, a song built on Faye Wong’s 1993 Cantonese ballad “Seasonal Wind”, and released it on October 31, the last night of that run, with Wong credited on the cover as the featured artist. Other city songs, apparently called “Rio” and “Tokyo”, have surfaced at other stops. In August he also reissued “Out of Time” as a joint single with Tomoko Aran, whose city pop song “I’m in Love” supplies its melody.

The question of the name ran through all of it. In early 2025 he told Variety that The Weeknd had been “mastered” and that he wanted “to know what tomorrow looks like”. In Stockholm in August 2026, at the start of a three-night stand, he turned that around: “I’ll never disappear. I love this too much to ever disappear.”

Away from the stage, his public commitments stay close to where he comes from. He became a goodwill ambassador for the UN World Food Programme in 2021, after giving $1 million to relief for people affected by the war in Tigray, and the XO Humanitarian Fund he set up with the agency in 2022 took a dollar from every ticket sold on this tour. Toronto gave him the key to the city in July 2025, citing his ties to Scarborough.

The tour is scheduled to end on November 5 at TM Stadium Nasional in Kuala Lumpur, and no new album has been announced. What he has confirmed is that The Weeknd is staying, which leaves Abel Tesfaye, the man who once planned to step out from behind the name, still waiting for his turn.