Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, known professionally as the Weeknd, is a Canadian singer, songwriter and record producer. Born in Toronto and raised in Scarborough, Tesfaye began his recording career in 2009 by anonymously uploading his song "Do It" to YouTube. Two years later, he met music executives Sal Slaiby and Amir Esmailian, with whom he founded XO Records. He chose his stage name in tribute to when he, along with a friend, dropped out of high school at seventeen years old, took his mattress, and "left one weekend and never came home". His sophomore album, Beauty Behind the Madness (2015), with the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Can't Feel My Face" and "The Hills", won Best Urban Contemporary Album and was nominated for Album of the Year at the 2016 Grammy Awards. Tesfaye's third album Starboy (2016) was a similar commercial success and included the number-one single of the same name, and also won Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 2018 Grammy Awards. His fourth album, After Hours (2020), featured the Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles "Heartless", "Save Your Tears", and "Blinding Lights", the latter of which has become the first song in history to spend over a year in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100, and was the most streamed song on Spotify in 2020. Among the world's best selling musical artists with over 75 million records sold, Tesfaye has won many accolades, including three Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards, nineteen Billboard Music Awards, two MTV Video Music Awards, fifteen Juno Awards, five SOCAN awards and one Brit Award, and has been nominated for an Academy Award.