This was intoxicating music for the intoxicated, made by an unreliable and perhaps unscrupulous narrator, coaxing the listener into zonked-out rendezvous.
His intentions were immediately clear but slyly broached, a sensation enhanced by the literal facelessness of his few early press photos. He was a seedy but charismatic figure, alluring in his unknowability, in a way that felt pointedly at odds with the other Torontonian who had just hit the big time.
As Drake descended on America, peddling the good-guy earnestness of his So Far Gone era, The Weeknd performed a dispassionate chicanery. In the big picture, that sentiment proved even truer.
Over the last 15 years, The Weeknd has led one of the stranger careers in pop history, ascending from backroom enigma to Starboy to halftime headliner. In that time, Abel Tesfaye, the singer behind The Weeknd, has grappled with how best to square his own icon ambitions with the incognito persona's duplicity. The new Weeknd album, Hurry Up Tomorrow , is pegged as his last — or, as he put it to Variety , the end of his existence as The Weeknd, an entity saddled with a lifetime's worth of baggage.
This recognition comes with a karmic judgement self-imposed by the creator, as — spoiler alert — the anti-hero within these songs dies, leaving only questions about the legacy of the alter-ego and the promised resurrection of its performer.
