Featured Album
- FEB 9, 2024
- 36 Songs
- WE DON'T TRUST YOU · 2024
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2015
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2015
- Starboy · 2016
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2015
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2014
- Blinding Lights - Single · 2019
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2015
- The Idol Episode 4 (Music from the HBO Original Series) - Single · 2023
- Beauty Behind the Madness · 2015
Essential Albums
- "You can find love, fear, friends, enemies, violence, dancing, sex, demons, angels, loneliness, and togetherness all in the After Hours of the night.” —The Weeknd Ever since The Weeknd emerged in 2011 with the mysterious and mesmerizing House of Balloons, the Toronto native has kept us on our toes: There was a trio of druggy, lo-fi R&B mixtapes, the Top 40 cake-topper “Can’t Feel My Face,” and the glossy, Daft Punk-assisted rebirth that came with 2016’s Starboy. On After Hours, his fourth studio album, the singer returns to early-era Abel Tesfaye—the fragile falsetto, the smoky atmospheres, the whispered confessions. But here, they’re bolstered by some seriously brilliant beatmaking: muted, shuffling drum ’n’ bass (“Hardest to Love”), whistling sirens and staccato trap textures (“Escape From LA"), and flickers of French touch, warped dubstep, and Chicago drill that have been stretched and bent into abstractions. It’s as if Tesfaye spent the past four years scouring underground warehouse parties for rhythms that could make his low-lit R&B balladry feel hedonistic, thrilling, and alive (and the above statement he sent Apple Music about the album seems to confirm that). When the album does lift into moments of brightness, they’re downright radiant: “Scared to Live” is sweeping and sentimental, fit for the final scene in a romantic comedy, and “Blinding Lights”—a Max Martin-produced megahit boosted by a Mercedes-Benz commercial—is about as glitzy, glamorous, and gloriously ’80s as it gets.
- A year after the release of his GRAMMY®-winning breakthrough—2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness—The Weeknd returns with Starboy, a double album of interstellar soul and feverish R&B that orbits around an ambitious title character. Bookended by two titanic but very different Daft Punk collaborations, it’s a listening experience that, from start to finish, speaks to the Toronto native’s mastery of both melody and mood. “It’s good to have darkness,” he told Beats 1’s Zane Lowe. “Because when the light comes, it feels that much better.”
- When The Weeknd’s debut mixtape, House of Balloons, dropped in 2011, it was clear, even then, that something had shifted. This was a divergent kind of R&B that hinged on atmospherics over vocal prowess—an almost soulless quality in a genre built around soul. At the time, The Weeknd was largely anonymous, hiding in the shadows of his own music, the aloofness only adding to the allure. He was no one and yet everyone, as his raw, bruised candor resonated with fans suffering the effects of overexposure and contradicting desires to both feel and be numb simultaneously. He was a decent enough singer (his falsetto often drew comparisons to Michael Jackson), but it was the one-two punch of the nocturnal sound and indulgent lyrics—the darkness, the dysfunction, the hazy synth-bath of it all—that gave it staying power. When he says, “Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this,” as he declares on the opening track, it's hard to tell whether it's an invitation or a warning, but it landed on ears that were all too happy to oblige. House of Balloons, here now in its original form with all samples restored, introduces the sentiment that has underscored nearly all of The Weeknd's music that's followed: a blurring of the lines between love and addiction, between having a good time and being consumed by it. In multi-part songs such as “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” and “The Party & The After Party,” a night's zenith and nadir are never too far apart; his audience, like his women, are held captive by the mercurial nature of his moods. A line like “Bring your love, baby, I could bring my shame/Bring the drugs, baby, I could bring my pain,” from lead single “Wicked Games,” serves as a kind of mission statement for the mixtape's (and, perhaps, the singer himself's) central tension. In the exchange of affection and substances, there exists an emotional transference wherein power is gained by feeling the least. The Weeknd taps into our id-driven urges for pleasure and domination and rewards them again and again. Cruelty somehow becomes sexy in this world where detachment—from everything—is the only goal; the music that he’s created as a soundtrack continues to leave its audience equally insatiable. As the years go by, House of Balloons has become increasingly timeless. It remains as much an exercise in mythmaking (and star-making) for The Weeknd as a testament to our own pathological impulses, sending us barreling towards destruction and ecstasy all at once.
Albums
- 2022
- 2020
- 2018
- 2016
- 2013
- 2024
- 2024
- 2023
- 2023
- 2023
- The moody R&B superstar explores the agony and ecstasy of love.
- A soundtrack that’s as haunting as it is exhilarating.
- The pop mastermind’s ominous, glamorous visions come alive.
- Take it deep with a dark force in pop and R&B.
- Album tracks and collabs sketch out his shadowy soul-pop visions.
- Every song you can expect to hear on The Weeknd’s action-packed tour.
- 2023
Live Albums
- 2023
Compilations
- 2016
- 2012
Appears On
- Swedish House Mafia & Adriatique
- Lana Del Rey & BloodPop®
- Lana Del Rey & The Avener
Radio Shows
- You won’t want to miss this new episode of The Weeknd’s show.
- Weighing in on Maroon 5's Halftime Show and more.
- The artist speaks to Zane about his song "Popular."
- Revisiting the biggest shows in Super Bowl Halftime history.
- A year in the life of Apple Music’s Artist of the Year.
- ROSALÍA takes over this week’s episode of MEMENTO MORI.
- The artist on "LA FAMA."
- XO celebrates Halloween with an exclusive mix from MIKE DEAN 🎃.
More To See
About The Weeknd
Nobody makes feeling bad sound as good as The Weeknd. Even the singer’s sunniest tracks (“Can’t Feel My Face,” “Starboy”) feel anchored by darkness—the sense that pleasure is pain and beauty decays and you can’t have the night without the morning after. The brainchild of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye, the project took off in 2011 with a string of mixtapes (later collected as 2012’s Trilogy) that forged cavernous, falsetto-driven R&B with narratives drenched in drugs, sex, and other regrettable decisions—a sound both sensuous and detached, featherlight and dead heavy. One of the earliest musicians to find his footing on the internet, Tesfaye originally offered his music through YouTube and free downloads, a move that felt radical then but is common now. Ethiopian by heritage (his parents immigrated to Canada in the late ’80s, just before he was born), Tesfaye—out from behind the mask of making art online—has since come to represent the changing face of Toronto, rooting himself not just in an international musical community but in a specific diasporic experience. Tesfaye’s music has become a symbol of hedonism pushed to bleak excess, with a series of albums—including 2015’s Grammy-winning Beauty Behind the Madness, 2016’s multiplatinum Starboy, and 2020’s dense and atmospheric After Hours—whose narrators can’t seem to say no even if they hate themselves for it later. And though his music has gotten a little brighter over time, the prevailing mood remains heavy, even unsettling—the ride you want more of even when you’ve had too much. Speaking to Apple Music about the persona behind his songs, Tesfaye said, “I’m a chill person. That guy is who I am, but it is who I am to myself and in my writing. Sometimes you take him and then you create more, and then it becomes this beast. You add more to him, and then it’s uncontrollable—its own character. It’s like Scarface, the villain: It’s horrible, but you can’t stop looking at it.” Though he didn’t release a new album in 2021, he was a constant part of the cultural conversation, releasing a slew of singles, performing at the Super Bowl and on Saturday Night Live (think: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd”), and winning the Apple Music Award for Artist of the Year.
- HOMETOWN
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- BORN
- February 16, 1990
- GENRE
- R&B/Soul