The Weeknd: Sounds and sensibility

Abel Tesfaye, a 22-year-old Toronto-born singer of Ethiopian descent, doesn't show his face on the cover of House of Balloons, the first of three mixtapes he has released under the name the Weeknd. The image, nonetheless, serves as a self-portrait. Described simply, it sounds like simple fun: a bathroom full of balloons, with a naked woman in the bathtub. But, shot in a strangely dingy black and white, blurred, and with just one dehumanised breast and a pair of arms sticking out awkwardly from behind those balloons, the effect is creepy. Listen to Tesfaye's narcotised slow-jams and the photograph's message is clear: partying is an existential experience, sex is fraught with alienation, and everything registers as unreal and unsettling.

It might all sound like a massive downer – and would be were Tesfaye's voice not one of the most compelling of those driving a new strain of R&B. This is a mode of address based not on sleek confidence, but rather a lack of it. If Tesfaye and his cohort are going to seduce you, they'll do it by telling you how much they are hurting and how many feelings they are feeling: on Twitter and elsewhere the Weeknd suffixes his name with "xo" – as in, a kiss and a hug.

There are sex and drugs, lots of both, but scant pleasure to be found in either. Whether over booze – as on Kendrick Lamar's Swimming Pools (Drank) – or assorted pharmaceuticals, as on Frank Ocean's Novacane ("fuck me numb/love me none"), the ambivalence runs deep and pervasive. Even famously Adderall-happy rapper Danny Brown confesses on xxx: "I try to escape it, hoping drugs numb a soul."

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This new mode is also about a blurring, or extension of the genre's sounds, as well as its sensibility. The names might be a bit silly (for instance, "PBR&B", PB as in Pabst Beer – beverage of choice for the American hipster), but the music is quietly radical, with work by Miguel (who just released the rightly acclaimed Kaleidoscope Dream) evidence of an ongoing, mutually enriching dialogue between indie and electronic musicians and R&B artists.

Frank Ocean, who last summer on Tumblr posted a deeply moving testimony of falling in love with a man, saw Channel Orange, his major label debut, chart at No 2 in US and British markets – a huge commercial success that resonates with the re-election of a gay-marriage-supporting, African American president.

Like Ocean, Tesfaye has earned a fanbase by releasing music online for free – songs built around a fogged, crepuscular production to set off the keening perfection of his voice. These shadowy sounds were, until recently, matched with shadowy presentation: for months Tesfaye his identity. But, like Ocean, his output has led to a major label deal. Next week, Universal will release Trilogy, an album of remixed, remastered material from his existing work, plus three new songs. Tesfaye will no longer be an enigma.

He first showed his face in the typically monochrome video for Rolling Stone, released last month. Looking hungover or drugged or emotionally spent, he wearily meets the camera's gaze as though it is a lover who has failed him too often.

Fittingly, it was Drake – the seigneur of self-loathing, lotharioed confessionalism ("I've had sex four times this week, I'll explain/Having a hard time adjusting to fame") – who effectively broke Tesfaye, tweeting his endorsement for his fellow Canadian in March last year by quoting lyrics from the Chris Isaak-indebted Wicked Games ("Bring your love baby I could bring my shame/ Bring the drugs baby I could bring my pain").

Interest reached such a pitch that when Tesfaye released his third mixtape, Echoes of Silence, last December, his website crashed under the weight of traffic. "The Weeknd has broken the internet" ran the approving online consensus. Since then, he has been asked to remix Lady Gaga and Florence & the Machine and has just finished touring with the latter, who joked she didn't want to: "burst that mysterious bubble of his so ... I'll just say I've never actually seen him – he's a hologram!"

Two weeks ago, on stage at Manhattan's Terminal 5, Tesfaye sold out the 3,000-capacity venue, playing to a crowd of mainly teenage couples in an atmosphere of sweat, hormones and marijuana smoke. As he launched into his swooning, enormous High For This and sang "trust me girl/you wanna be high for this", everyone unavoidably was.

His demeanour was at odds with his narcotised online aesthetic: irrepressible to the point of puppyish, he looked wholesome in a puffy black ski jacket and performed with the showmanship and stage-ease of an X Factor shoo-in, and greeted the encore-demanding screams with a clowning, exaggerated victory march of a re-entrance.

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MTV has proclaimed him "the best musical talent since Michael Jackson" – hyperbole given some credence by D.D, an uncanny cover of the King of Pop's Dirty Diana. And, under one YouTube clip of Valerie, a new track that will feature on Trilogy, the top comment reads: "Michael Jackson never died ..."

On Thursday, it was announced that the Weeknd will be appearing on Later ... With Jools Holland in the UK at the end of this month, but Tesfaye still isn't speaking to the press. Perhaps, like Jackson, he is genuinely shy, truly the troubled soul he paints in his lyrics. Or perhaps his press-aversion is a calculated effort to sustain his mystique. Whichever, hopefully he will enjoy his fame well enough, but not well enough to soften any of that creatively profitable angst.