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Meanwhile, Tesfaye has aligned himself with the fashion-oriented women – Kendall and Kylie Jenner, Gigi Hadid and her sister (and Tesfaye’s rumoured girlfriend) Bella, Cara Delevingne and Karlie Kloss – who orbit close to Swift’s highly managed pop machine.Īs of mid-July, the Weeknd had three songs in the US pop charts: Earned It – the ballad he wrote for the film Fifty Shades of Grey, Can’t Feel My Face and Love Me Harder, recorded with pop princess Ariana Grande. Max Martin, the Swedish producer behind the careers of Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry and most recently Swift herself, has added pop gloss to a genre known as PBR&B (from the hipster beer Pabst Blue Ribbon) – an electronic-influenced subdivision of R&B that includes Frank Ocean and FKA twigs. “He’s on his way to becoming one of the biggest male pop stars in an era dominated by divas,” wrote Time pop critic Nolan Feeney.Īpple Music has put its as-yet-untested might behind the Weeknd, inviting him to perform at its recent launch.
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Last week, the New York Times predicted that the new album’s “closest recent analogue” was Taylor Swift’s country-to-pop monster crossover hit 1989. With the release this month of a second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness, backed by a compelling single, Can’t Feel My Face, which has a groove and feel reminiscent of an updated Michael Jackson hit, any residual sense of anonymity could be about to be irrevocably lost. Only five years ago, Tesfaye, 25, was folding shirts at a Toronto outlet of American Apparel and posting audio tracks on YouTube. But each time stardom beckoned, Abel Tesfaye – a native of the dreary Toronto suburb of Scarborough, who sings, writes and produces as the Weeknd – seemed to demur. F or several years, an introverted Canadian singer of Ethiopian descent, known to R&B lovers for his plaintive voice and atmospheric, after-party, comedown groove, has been on the cusp of becoming music’s next big thing.