The change comes after the artist asked fans in April whether he should be known as “ABEL formally known as The Weeknd”, and follows an interview with W Magazine in which he said he was “ready to close the Weeknd chapter”.
https://twitter.com/theweeknd/status/1510723032930693123?s=20
“I’ll still make music, maybe as Abel, maybe as The Weeknd,” he said in the interview. “But I still want to kill The Weeknd. And I will. Eventually. I’m definitely trying to shed that skin and be reborn.”
He added the current album he’s working on is likely to be his “last hurrah” under the name The Weeknd.
Photo: Matt Winkelmeyer
Today’s change might only be on his Twitter and Instagram handles, but with a combined 77m-plus followers across both accounts, it marks a nod toward him finally seeing shedding his artistic moniker.
Born in Toronto in 1990, Abel Tesfaye is the only child of Ethiopian immigrants who separated when the singer was just a toddler: his father, Makkonen Tesfaye, and mother Samrawit Hailu.
Earlier this year, Abel Tesfaye was deemed the most popular artist in the world, according to the Guinness World Records – by some way too.
Their decision was judged from Spotify data which found the artist had set the record for having the most monthly listeners on Spotify (111.4 million in March 2023) and was the first artist on the platform to hit 100 million monthly listeners.
