As he’s been slowly creeping to The Weeknd’s demise with every new musical project and visual release, Abel Tesfaye is finally voicing what has artistically been coming for quite some time now: The Weeknd will eventually be no more.
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A force in the music industry for more than a decade under the iconic moniker, Abel recently admitted the alter ego may be entering retirement sooner rather than later.
In a new interview with W Magazine promoting his latest project, The Idol, Abel dove deep into behind-the-scenes details about his upcoming musical drama set to premiere this June. That ultimately led him to start questioning his own pop star persona and identity as The Weeknd.
While shooting a scene for the show while also performing a concert as The Weeknd at Los Angeles’ SoFi stadium. Abel explained, “I had to take off the Weeknd outfit, put on Tedros’s wig, shoot with Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), then go back to being The Weeknd.”
“It was tough to go from one head to another. Then, after the concert, I lost my voice. No voice came out at all. That’s never happened before,” he continued. “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. As The Weeknd, I’ve never skipped a concert. I’ve performed with the flu. I’ll die on that stage. But there was something very complicated going on with my mind at that moment.”
“It’s getting to a place and a time where I’m getting ready to close the Weeknd chapter,” Abel expressed to W. “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.”
While this pivot that included 2020’s After Hours and last year’s Dawn FM seems to be an actually planned out, grand final overhaul. The concept of being reborn isn’t a foreign one to Tesfaye. In 2016, he used his “Starboy” music video to kill off the “old” and re-introduce a new Weeknd (aka the era when he cut his signature locs).
“The album I’m working on now is probably my last hurrah as The Weeknd,” Tesfaye said. “This is something that I have to do. As The Weeknd, I’ve said everything I can say.”
To read up on everything else Abel had to say about his latest project and more, check out the full W article here.
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