The Weeknd

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Essential Albums

  • After Hours
    After Hours
    After Hours

    "You can find love, fear, friends, enemies, violence, dancing, sex, demons, angels, loneliness and togetherness all in the After Hours of the night.” —The Weeknd Ever since The Weeknd emerged in 2011 with the mysterious and mesmerising House of Balloons, the Toronto native has kept us on our toes: There was a trio of druggy, lo-fi R&B mixtapes, the Top 40 cake-topper “Can’t Feel My Face” and the glossy, Daft Punk-assisted rebirth that came with 2016’s Starboy. On After Hours, his fourth studio album, the singer returns to early-era Abel Tesfaye—the fragile falsetto, the smoky atmospheres, the whispered confessions. But here, they’re bolstered by some seriously brilliant beatmaking: muted, shuffling drum ’n’ bass (“Hardest to Love”), whistling sirens and staccato trap textures (“Escape From LA") and flickers of French touch, warped dubstep and Chicago drill that have been stretched and bent into abstractions. It’s as if Tesfaye spent the past four years scouring underground warehouse parties for rhythms that could make his low-lit R&B balladry feel hedonistic, thrilling and alive (and the above statement he sent Apple Music about the album seems to confirm that). When the album does lift into moments of brightness, they’re downright radiant: “Scared to Live” is sweeping and sentimental, fit for the final scene in a romantic comedy, and “Blinding Lights”—a Max Martin-produced megahit boosted by a Mercedes-Benz commercial—is about as glitzy, glamorous and gloriously ’80s as it gets.

  • Starboy
    Starboy
    Starboy

    A year after the release of his GRAMMY®-winning breakthrough—2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness—The Weeknd returns with Starboy, a double album of interstellar soul and feverish R&B that orbits around an ambitious title character. Bookended by two titanic but very different Daft Punk collaborations, it’s a listening experience that, from start to finish, speaks to the Toronto native’s mastery of both melody and mood. “It’s good to have darkness,” he told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “Because when the light comes, it feels that much better.”

  • House of Balloons (Original)
    House of Balloons (Original)
    House of Balloons (Original)

    When House of Balloons emerged from its vaporous cloud of internet mystery in early 2011, it wasn’t clear that The Weeknd was about to help shift the course of mainstream pop. If anything, the album’s pervasive moodiness seemed to work contrary to the pleasure and liberation pop usually promised. It was’t a party album—it was an after-party album. And like any after-party, whatever fun it had to offer was tempered by the queasy sense that the fun had already been had—and that burning the candle in hopes of more would only reveal how desperate and sad it all was. As for Abel Tesfaye, the man in the middle? Yes, his voice was beautiful: High, sweet and fragile, with a way of fluttering around its upper reaches (a method he said he learned from listening to Ethiopian pop as a kid). But when your idea of romance is “Bring your love, baby, I could bring my shame/Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain” (“Wicked Games”), it doesn’t exactly make you sound like a fun date. Interesting, sure. But, like, who would want to hang out with this guy? And yet the music managed to capture a seductive loop of melancholy and debauchery—the perilous lows of chasing highs—rarely heard in pop or otherwise. Drake brought him in early, of course, drafting Tesfaye to co-write five songs on 2011’s definitive playboy’s lament, Take Care. (Just ask Drake: It’s lonely at the top.) And alongside Tesfaye’s other two 2011 albums, Thursday and Echoes of Silence—all collected later on Trilogy—House of Balloons was an early swell in a wave of albums by artists like Frank Ocean, Miguel and Beyoncé that recast R&B as one of the more experimental and creatively fertile sounds in modern music. “And when I’m over only pray/That I flow from the bottom/Closer to the top/The higher that I climb/The harder I’ma drop,” he sang on “The Morning”. Maybe. But it hasn’t happened yet.

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About The Weeknd

Nobody makes feeling bad sound as good as The Weeknd. 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. 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. 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. 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. His 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. And though his music has gotten a little brighter over time, the prevailing mood remains heavy, even unsettling—the ride you want more of even when you’ve had too much. Speaking to Apple Music about the persona behind his songs, Tesfaye said: “I’m a chill person. That guy is who I am, but it is who I am to myself and in my writing. Sometimes you take him and then you create more, and then it becomes this beast. You add more to him, and then it’s uncontrollable—its own character. It’s like Scarface, the villain: It’s horrible, but you can’t stop looking at it.” Though he didn’t release a new album in 2021, he was a constant part of the cultural conversation, dropping a slew of singles, performing at the Super Bowl and on Saturday Night Live (think: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd”), and winning the Apple Music Award for Artist of the Year. After a banner 2021, he unleashed 2022’s Dawn FM, a cross-decade synth-pop exhibition for the ages. Featuring flourishes of new wave (“Gasoline”), astral rock (“Here We Go... Again”) and other genres in between, the album tightropes the retro and the modern—a singular vision curated by a singular artist.

HOMETOWN
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
BORN
16 February 1990
GENRE
R&B/Soul

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