Abel Makkonen Tesfaye is a Canadian singer, songwriter and record producer, known professionaly as The Weeknd, who began his musical career in 2009 by anonymously releasing music to YouTube. The following year he met Jeremy Rose, a producer who had an idea for a dark contemporary R&B musical project, and after initially trying to pitch the idea to musician Curtis Santiago, Rose played one of his instrumentals for Tesfaye, who freestyle rapped over it. This led to the two collaborating on an album, with Rose producing three songs, 'What You Need', 'Loft Music', and 'The Morning', amongst a few others that Tesfaye had sung on, but the sessions were ultimately scrapped. Rose let Tesfaye keep the tracks he had produced under the condition that Rose would be credited for them, but in December 2010 Tesfaye uploaded the three afore-mentioned songs to YouTube under the username "xoxxxoooxo", with the posts subsequently receiving coverage from various media outlets, including Pitchfork and The New York Times. Before adopting the stage name The Weeknd, Tesfaye recorded with production group The Noise in 2008/2009, but before the results could be released he split with them and founded his XO record label in 2011, releasing the critically acclaimed mixtape 'House Of Balloons'. The Noise were justifiable annoyed by this, and leaked snippets of their tracks in 2011, before leaking the whole session in 2016. The sessions with The Noise were intended to be a darker sound to what fans might know, with plentiful use of auto-tune, and although these are only demos, I'm sure fans will still want to hear them to get a feel for what Tesfaye was doing in those early years.
Track listing
01 Birthday Suit
02 Do It
03 Through Her
04 Material Girl
05 Rescue You
06 Appointment
07 Xray
08 Cure
09 In The Mood (Bulleez'n'Nerdz)
10 Superhero
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