At the end of May, the Weeknd (née Abel Tesfaye) released the visuals for his most recent single, "The Hills", a dark, almost discordant meditation on lust, drugs, and fame. The track, with its grating chords and vulgar lyrics, is jarring to the uninitiated. But to those familiar with his repertoire, the only twist in "The Hills" is how it ends: as the final chords fade, a woman’s voice, syrupy and sedate, closes with a lullaby of sorts—not in English, but in Amharic, the primary language of Ethiopia and the Weeknd’s own native tongue.

"Ewedihalew, yene konjo, ewedihalew/ yene fikir fikir fikir, yene fikir fikir fikir," the voice almost cries, an elegiac ending in the language the Ethiopian-Canadian singer grew up speaking with the grandmother who raised him. The closing, when translated directly, is a declaration of devotion that deviates from the rest of the song’s lustful antipathy: "I love you, my beauty, I love you/ my love love love, my love love love." The phrase is in many ways reflective of the world from which it comes: earnest, saccharine, and dramatic.

-=-=-=-The Weeknd first performed "The Hills" back in April, during his closing set at the main stage of Coachella, altering the original lyric to "ewedishalew," reflecting the switch in gender from the sampled female singer’s voice to his own (in Amharic, statements must shift to accommodate their objects). The moment, captured on video and shared across the web, may have confused some Coachella attendees, but it sent his East African fanbase into overdrive.

Tesfaye first appeared on the R&B scene with a series of self-released albums in 2011—House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence—released together with additional tracks the following year as Trilogy. Initially reluctant to shed the cloak of anonymity that complemented the haziness of his music, the Weeknd remained reclusive for months, revealing himself as Tesfaye only after securing his major label deal.

But for his Ethiopian and Eritrean diasporic fanbase, Tesfaye’s voice itself (and the length of his songs) had long been a dead giveaway of the singer’s identity. His trademark vibrato, the characteristically pained whine that pervades much of Tesfaye’s music, draws from a long Ethiopian musical legacy of tortured pining. Imbuing our voices with the shaky pain of loss—romantic or otherwise—is a hallmark of Ethiopian musical tradition. Tesfaye, with his staccato wails and aching nostalgia, is a young, North American addition to a dynasty of melodramatic Ethiopian singers.