The Weeknd Wants to ‘Kill’ The Weeknd: “It’s My Last Album”
The Canadian singer wants to close this stage of his artistic career after an incredible trajectory
Abel Tesfaye, best known as The Weeknd, is probably one of the music icons that could most easily be associated with success for the past decade. After winning more than a dozen Billboard Music Awards, four Grammys and billions of streams in the years since, he might be ready to say goodbye to this phase of his artistic career.
Yes, as it sounds: The Weeknd has an expiration date. And it’s not that he’s facing a drop in popularity or that his songs no longer work among his millions of listeners… It’s that the Canadian artist wants to close this stage.
This has been confirmed by Abel himself during an interview with W Magazine in which he has been promoting his new artistic facet as Tedros in his role in the ‘The Idol’, whose premiere is just around the corner on HBO.
The End of The Weeknd
“I’m going through a cathartic path right now,” he said. “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”, the songwriter confessed.
During the interview, Tesfaye does not make it clear if there will be an end date to one of the most successful aliases in the music industry since it began its journey a decade ago. And it may have a lot to do with the huge success he achieved with his double musical project After hours til dawn, which he even merged for his world tour that had to be delayed due to the pandemic.
But the end of The Weeknd is near as he himself assures: “The album I’m working on now is probably my last hurrah as The Weeknd. This is something that I have to do. As The Weeknd, I’ve said everything I can say.”
What is clear is that the Canadian singer is having a hard time maintaining that duality of characters through which his music is flowing. Even for his role in the new TV bet, he has been composing music that will be part of the soundtrack of the HBO production.
It’s over. An end to an artistic era that has allowed us to enjoy one of the most innovative artists of the 21st century: “I like when all the odds are against me,” he said. “I’ve always been an underdog—in the beginning, the music business was not easy. I had to fight to get to the top of the mountain”, he states.
The Weeknd numbers are there and speak for themselves. Now all that’s left to enjoy is a farewell that will surely make history. And of course, to hope that the new artist who is reborn will be even better than the one we say goodbye to.
You can read the Spanish version of this article here by Juan Vicente.