The Weeknd may not be The Weeknd much longer. The R&B singer born Abel Tesfaye says he’s getting ready to kiss his stage name goodbye.
“I’m going through a cathartic path right now,” Tesfaye tells W Magazine in a new interview. “It’s getting to a place and a time where I’m getting ready to close the Weeknd chapter. I’ll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as The Weeknd. But I still want to kill The Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.”
As The Weeknd, Tesfaye has had runaway success, with four No. 1 albums and seven No. 1 tracks on Billboard’s charts, including his hits “Can’t Feel My Face,” “The Hills,” and “Blinding Lights.”
And before he accused the Grammy Awards of corruption and swore off future submissions to the awards show, Tesfaye won four, including two trophies for Best Urban Contemporary Album.
In a 2013 Reddit AMA, Tesfaye explained the origins of his stage name, saying it refers to when he and a friend dropped out of school and left home when he was around 17 years old.
“We grabbed our mattresses from our parents, threw it in our friend’s s—ty van and left one weekend and never came back home,” he wrote. “It was gonna be the title of HOB [the 2011 mixtape ‘House of Balloons’]. I hated my name at the time, though, so I tried it as a stage name. It sounded cool. I took out the ‘e’ because there was already a Canadian band named The Weekend.”
While the 33-year-old contemplates an evolution in his performing persona, fans will see him in a new light with the upcoming HBO drama “The Idol,” set to debut on June 4. Tesfaye plays a nightclub impresario with Tedros who enthralls Jocelyn, a struggling pop star played by Lily-Rose Depp.
Last September, Tesfaye and Depp filmed a scene for the show during one of his concerts at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Tesfaye lost his voice that night. “That’s never happened before,” he told W Magazine. “My theory is that I forgot how to sing because I was playing Tedros, a character who doesn’t know how to sing. I may be looking too deeply into this, but it was terrifying. … There was something very complicated going on with my mind at that moment.”