The grit from those early days was lost amid the Hollywood glamour of the display, an interesting choice for an artist whose last album spoke profoundly to a desire to leave all that behind.

And on Sunday night, Tesfaye took the stage for the Super Bowl LV halftime show a decade after the early rumblings about the Toronto singer making perfect, cherubic filth. He put together an accomplished live show. Tesfaye sought out pop and dance music veterans like Daft Punk and Max Martin and duetted with Ed Sheeran and Ariana Grande. In the intervening years, Tesfaye has evolved from an invisible man into a ubiquitous one, careful pivot by careful pivot, logging increasingly successful hits increasingly removed from the chunky, post-genre soup of his early mixtapes. Without glossy videos or a lively social-media presence - this in the days before Instagram caught on - Abel lingered in your head like stifled urges. The Weeknd turned R&B on its head without showing his face. In March 2011, the Weeknd released House of Balloons, a mixtape sequenced like a journey through the highs, lows, and lonesome aftereffects of a wild night out, setting the scene by advising the listener in the first song that “You’ll wanna be high for this,” then wandering through strip clubs, parties, and after parties to the inevitable anxieties and pangs of withdrawal that surface as you sweat everything out the next day. The singer, an East Toronto native and recent college dropout named Abel Tesfaye, gave voice to our darkest late-night moods, to the allure of pushing a body past its limit in pursuit of pleasures both psychedelic and carnal. They were studies in stark contrasts: “Loft Music” floated gossamer samples of Brooklyn indie rockers Beach House over trap drums, and “What You Need” sunk a sample of Aaliyah’s voice under gauzy synths, her whisper bubbling up through the watery mix like a lover emerging from a warm bath, all of this in service to an angelic voice uttering the most devilish advances.

Ten winters ago, a trove of snaking, lascivious R&B tracks appeared seemingly out of thin air, credited to someone or thing called the Weeknd. From stem to stern, it was a night of keeping up appearances, a simulation of normalcy in a year where normal doesn’t seem possible.

I feel it coming the weeknd stems