About The Weeknd
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye , known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor. His accolades include four Grammy Awards, 20 Billboard Music Awards, 22 Juno Awards, six American Music Awards, three MTV Video Music Awards, a Latin Grammy Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Primetime Emmy Award.
Tesfaye began releasing music anonymously in 2009. After co-founding the record label XO, he released three mixtapes—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—in 2011, and gained recognition for his blend of contemporary and alternative R&B, as well as the mystery surrounding his identity. He signed with Republic Records to reissue the mixtapes into the compilation album Trilogy , and release his debut studio album, Kiss Land the following year. After a string of collaborations and film soundtrack contributions from 2013 and 2014, Tesfaye began combining his signature alternative R&B sound with a more pop-oriented approach on his second and third studio albums, Beauty Behind the Madness and Starboy , both of which debuted atop the US Billboard 200, spawning the US Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Can't Feel My Face", "The Hills", "Starboy", and "Die for You".
He returned to a more alternative R&B-dominated soundscape for his debut extended play, My Dear Melancholy , which included the US top-ten single "Call Out My Name". He explored the dream-pop and new wave genres with his fourth studio album, After Hours , which spawned the chart-topping singles "Heartless", "Save Your Tears", as well as "Blinding Lights", which became the best-performing song in the Billboard Hot 100's history and the longest-charting song at the time. Tesfaye began exploring dance-pop, leading to his fifth album, Dawn FM , which included the US top-ten single, "Take My Breath". In 2023, he co-created and starred in the HBO drama series The Idol, which was a critical failure, while its accompanying soundtrack saw commercial success. His sixth album, Hurry Up Tomorrow , yielded the US top-five single, "Timeless".
Tesfaye has sold over 75 million records, making him one of the world's best-selling artists. He has earned seven diamond-certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America for his singles, and is the first artist to simultaneously hold the top three spots on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. He has also set the record for most songs to have over 1 billion streams on Spotify , with "Blinding Lights" being the most-streamed song in the platform's history. Tesfaye was listed by Time as one of the world's most influential people in 2020, and was dubbed the "world's most popular artist" by Guinness World Records in 2023. An advocate for racial equality and food security, he was appointed a World Food Programme goodwill ambassador in 2021. He has donated millions to causes related to racial equality, food security, and disaster relief, including substantial contributions to COVID-19 relief efforts and the Ethiopian humanitarian crisis.
Abel Tesfaye was born on February 16, 1990, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The only child of Ethiopian immigrants Makkonen Tesfaye and Samrawit Hailu, who separated shortly after his birth, he was raised in the suburb of Scarborough by his mother and grandmother. Tesfaye's patronymic is spelled "Makkonen" instead of the traditional Ethiopian name "Makonnen". The similarity with the Finnish surname Makkonen is pure coincidence. The spelling of Tesfaye's patronymic might be the result of a typographic error or a new form of the traditional name. Tesfaye is proficient in Amharic, his native language acquired from his grandmother, and is also fluent in French, as he attended a French immersion school. He was further educated at West Hill Collegiate Institute and Birchmount Park Collegiate Institute.
At seventeen, Tesfaye dropped out of school and relocated to an apartment in the neighbourhood of Parkdale with two friends, one of whom is La Mar Taylor—his best friend and now creative director. Living a hedonistic lifestyle with his friends, Tesfaye adopted his stage name because he left home on a weekend. He removed the last 'e' in 'weekend' to avoid trademark issues with the Canadian pop rock band the Weekend. He has also experienced homelessness and was incarcerated on several occasions during this time, which encouraged him to "smarten up, to focus". During this time, Tesfaye frequently engaged in drug use, including substances such as ketamine, cocaine, MDMA, magic mushrooms, and cough syrup, stating that drugs were a "crutch" for him when he wrote music. Before releasing music under his current stage name, he went under the alias "Kin Kane", as part of a hip-hop duo called "Bulleez n Nerdz", and was part of a production team called 'the Noise'.
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