Every song on his debut mixtape, House of Balloons, feels like it’s unfolding in the dim-lit back rooms of a nightclub, and every character in them is looking to get high, naked, or both. In contrast to Tesfaye’s performative anonymity, the persona he cultivated as the Weeknd left little to the imagination.
Within just a few years the Weeknd would embrace the spotlight and become the kind of pop star who dates supermodels and performs at the Super Bowl halftime show, all without losing his singular vision. That secrecy made his tales of sex, drugs and partying feel all the more unsettling – and riveting.
Even after some of his earliest songs were shared on Drake’s OVO blog, it would be months before Tesfaye revealed his name and face. In fact, we had no way of knowing that he was a singular “he” – that the Weeknd was not a group, but the alter ego of singer and producer Abel Tesfaye. When we first encountered the Weeknd at the dawn of the 2010s, we had no way of knowing that he would become one of the biggest and most influential artists in popular music before the end of the decade.
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