Divine Timing: Elmiene Interviewed

Co-signed by the likes of Sampha and Stormzy, Abdala Elamin weaves transcendent tales of love, loss and lineage in his timeless songs. CLASH gets a glimpse into the interior world of this classic soul star in the making.

Few voices evoke the past like Elmiene. His is a voice that travels the RnB and soul continuum, laden with the heft and history that comes from studying the Greats. It’s poetic then, that I meet Elmiene on a cloudy Friday afternoon at Next Door Records in Shepherd’s Bush – a haven for music lovers and archivists. He’s towering above the racks of vinyls, flicking through with a sense of wondrous glee. He’s hard to miss and even more difficult to dislike. “This is really my area,” he nods to me as he reaches the funk and soul section, gravitating towards the works of his hero Stevie Wonder. “I’ve only recently started collecting records, I don’t have that many yet,” he tells me as he combs through and studies the sleeves. 

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The foundations of Elmiene’s love affair with music were not made in the eclectic shops in Shepherd’s Bush, but instead on the cobbled streets of Oxford. “The HMV there is between my house and the big park, so I’d go with my Walkman style CD player,” he recollects. “I’d buy the CD and do a big walk around the park, and I’d buy another and walk around town.” Discovering albums that would come to define you through Walkman-accompanied strolls may feel out of character in this age, but Elmiene isn’t your average 22-year-old. As we wander, Elmiene’s gaze settles on the work of Joni Mitchell. “I’m a big Joni fan, but the thing is, I’m a Joni fan because Prince was a Joni fan and he was always doing covers of her,” he tells me. It’s a theme that becomes more apparent as Elmiene curiously picks apart the inspirations of his heroes, finding secrets hidden within. “I just love ‘A Case Of You’, the rhythm, and the way she sings the melody. You never really know where she’s going but you just get it. It’s just beautiful.”

We come across a vinyl copy of Elmiene’s EP ‘Marking My Time’, which has been laid on the table behind us as we browse. “My housemate insisted that I bring it even though I really didn’t want to,” he tells me, somewhat embarrassed. “’Diane’ on this record was inspired by Joni Mitchell. I just love telling stories in songs. I started doing poetry first, so Joni felt like the perfect marriage of both.” Now that we’ve acknowledged the EP, Elmiene’s demeanour eases and he allows himself to beam with pride at the piece of art in front of him. “My biggest dream with my music was that I wanted it to be physical,” he says, holding the EP in his hands. “Now it’s real, it’s living, it’s not just data in the cloud. Like if the world ended and the internet went off it would still be there. I love that, I just think it’s so cool.”

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He continues: “The first record I bought was ‘Hotter Than July’ by Stevie. It had to be! I was in Falmouth visiting a couple of friends and we went to a second hand store. It wasn’t just a record shop, it had old PS2s and stuff. I was like oh my god I know that record. I love that record! It was my first time looking at the vinyl of an album I really love. It’s a whole different thing.” Floating on the reality of a tangible piece of music history in front of him, Elmiene caresses the clear vinyl and lyric-adorned inner sleeve. “God this is sick,” he mutters, waving it to his flatmate who’s sitting across the store. He confesses he hasn’t played the record yet, placing it on the shop’s decks, soulfully singing along an intricate murmur. “It sounds so good,” he laughs gleefully.

Elmiene is a student of music lore, and he’s keen to share records from the canon that have left an indelible mark on his artistry. “The three D’Angelo records, obviously, everything Stevie and then… Lewis Taylor,” he tells me, gushing about Taylor’s role as an unsung hero in the development of RnB. “It was Kenny Beats who showed me Lewis Taylor for the first time. In the studio, he played me the first song and I just started crying. For my entire life, I’d been looking for that gap between ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Voodoo’ and it was Lewis Taylor, the mystery had been solved.”

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Away from the distraction of the racks we begin to unravel the details of Elmiene’s astonishing rise to fame. His story began just three years ago with a viral cover of D’Angelo’s ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel)’, a track that landed him on the radar of the likes of Missy Elliott and Pharrell Williams. From there the momentum didn’t slow; his first single ‘Golden’ was picked by the late Virgil Abloh for his final Louis Vuitton show, and he was recently ranked fifth on BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2024 poll. It’s been a momentous, expeditious leap forward for an artist still only a handful of releases into his career. 

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of Elmiene’s ascendancy was refining his artistic identity in the public eye. He reflects on his early shows, his first one being a particularly “daunting” affair. “The first show I ever did was in Streatham at this event called Vocals and Verses,” he says. “They asked me to do a show but it was just a month after I’d blown up. I had only one original song, so I told them it was going to be mainly covers.” What would have been a nightmare scenario for any fledgling act became a recurring theme for Elmiene, with appearances at festivals racking up. Over time, Elmiene naturally landed on his feet. “I remember being backstage forever, I just wanted to get up there and do it,” he says. “I kind of just made my way through. And then I got to Bilal’s ‘Soul Sista’ and I was just like oh my God, this is amazing. I remember I saw the ghost of D’Angelo going by. My favourite D’Angelo record is ‘Live in Stockholm’ and I remember thinking I am right where he stood; I am on his stage, he was doing this, this is what all of this is about. Then I was just free. I was in it. When I left, I felt like I’d conquered the world.”

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“Ever since then, I’ve never really thought about the size of the audiences because performing feels so… natural. It’s what the Greats did, and I want to stand by them.” He continues bouncing through memories, telling me about his glorious Glastonbury debut, a moment where he looked around and thought to himself, ‘I think we’re gonna make it’. That’s not to say Elimiene takes live shows for granted, instead he sees them as a way to communicate his messaging with his fans. “We’ve had loads of unreleased songs in our set since we started, but it was through necessity,” he says. “Now that the songs are out, I still want to keep them as part of the main show, like at least three or two songs… if you’re doing me the courtesy of coming to my show, then I feel like I need to at least have a promise of what’s to come.” 

Each track, he tells me, “kind of feels a bit like show and tell”. Though he’s honoured and heartened by the way people react to his tracks, “it’s like you have different copies of the songs,” he explains. “Your perception of my song can be different to mine. We don’t own the same thing. I own my versions of the songs and have my context of what it is, and you have your version of the songs and your context to it. No one will ever have my complete context of the song. No matter how much I describe it, they will never have the complete emotions attached to a song. And I’ll never truly understand their perception of a song. Like why did that song make you cry? You thought of that person but I don’t know that person. And I love that. It’s just so nice that we can interpret music in our own ways and have our own, personalised versions of it.”

As seen in Issue 127 of CLASH. Order your copy here.

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Words: Eve Boothroyd
Photography: William Spooner
Creative Direction: Rob Meyers