![]() 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.
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