In an interview the W Magazine, The Weeknd plans to kill his stage after finishing his soon to be last album.
The singer, born Abel Tesfaye, says “I’m going through a cathartic path right now.”
In the conversation with W Magazine the singer went on to say “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.”
Under the stage name The Weeknd, Tesfaye had four number one albums and seven number one tracks including hits like “Can’t Feel My Face“, “The Hills”, and “Blinding Lights”. The singer even performed at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
In the past, the singer also accused the Grammy Awards for corruption and cut off any future submissions for himself for the show. The Weeknd took home four trophies throughout his career.
However, back in 2013, Tesfaye explained the origins of his stage name. The singer claimed on Reddit that 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.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The 33-year-old composer contemplated an evolution of his stage name after starring in the upcoming HBO drama “The Idol”. The series, set to debut on June 4th, stars Tesfaye alongside 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, which left the concert empty with fans going home.
“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.”
