Elmiene, the Future of R&B, Doesn’t ‘Give a F*ck’ About Fame and Celebrity
Courtesy of Def Jam
“This one’s for all the lovers in the house,” Elmiene purrs into the microphone. The sold-out room at Roulette sighs in recognition, a collective sound of content cutting through the New York City din. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” the singer quips, half-joking. Since his viral break in 2021, it seems that each day presents another opportunity for Elmiene to check off an “always-wanted-to.”
That evening when the Sudanese-Brit serenades Brooklyn, he is in rare form. It’s an uncharacteristically tropical spring night, and his absurd travel schedule — flying between Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles within 24 hours — and the erratic weather have teamed up to plot the demise of his voice. They do not succeed. Just two hours before, we sat in the green room backstage while he took his third dose of a menacing Chinese herbal cough syrup wearing sweatpants and a loose tee.
Now, onstage in one of his distinctive caftans, Elmiene sips an elixir of hot water, ginger, and honey from a mason jar and gives the set his all. The audience members in the very front row are at church. We all are, in a way. From the pit to the balcony, Brooklyn waves down his riffs like gospel, even when he veers off-setlist and starts covering early 2000s Hip-Hop hits.
Three months later, the Anyway I Can singer will admit he was so ill he was in “a delirium” that entire show. “It was just chaos,” he tells Teen Vogue. “It was just a lot. [But] it turned out great and everyone loved it.”
This is the intrigue of Elmiene. Over the course of the next seven months, three EPs, two world tours, and this sprawling set of conversations, he proves exactly why he’s poised to be the future of soul and R&B. His artistic desire is not fame, not money, not sex symbol status and underwear thrown onstage. Elmiene’s desire is to leave the world known as a durable, dedicated thread pulled from the creative fabric of musical legends — both a disciple and the direction.
The Bloke
The very first post on Elmiene’s Instagram is the video that made him a star. In it, he stands in the open mouth of a garage wearing Nike track pants, a hoodie zipped all the way up to his chin, flip flops, and that signature pick in his ‘fro.
The year was 2021. 20-year-old Elmiene, born Abdala Elamin, and his housemates were “playing around” with some busking equipment. He had never sung into a microphone before. Before he opened his mouth to sing the opening riff to his cover of his favorite artist D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” Elmiene was a creative writing major from Oxford almost through with uni.
“I half don't understand it because… when I recorded that video, I didn't want to post it or anything,” Elmiene says. We’re sitting in his dressing room in Downtown Brooklyn, in the underbelly of the cozy, creaky venue he’ll play that night. The AC leaks with a steady thrum like a metronome. “I told my friend who was recording, ‘That was sh*t.’ …That's just so long ago in my life. Wherever Elmiene is now, it's like 10 million light years away from that.”
A few months after, Elmiene would get his second viral break: having his first-ever single “Golden,” which was unreleased at the time, featured in Virgil Abloh’s final Louis Vuitton show, which took place two days after the designer’s passing and became a tribute in itself. “Golden” was hand-picked by Benji B, LV menswear music director and close friend of Abloh’s.
In the aftermath of “Golden,” Elmiene made his Glastonbury debut, collaborated with some of the biggest names in music in the States (Timbaland, Syd) and across the pond (Sampha, Lil Silva), released the critically acclaimed EPs El-Mean and Marking My Time plus a live project, and traversed the globe on multiple world tours.
Now, at 23 years old, Elmiene is one of the most promising vocalists of modern R&B who is consistently releasing stellar music. He is a masterful storyteller with boyish charm and aged English wit, quietly theatrical and bantering, a rambling, raw, natural talent whose drama and music teachers once beefed over his tutelage.
“I picked music… drama [felt] like it was never an intentional thing [for me] to do. I just have a really good time impersonating people,” he says. “I think that’s how I learned to sing. Even my voice right now is just a weird horrible chimera of all these different voices all put into one, from Michael to Stevie.”
Elmiene may self-deprecate as though he is just a derivative of his legends, but he connects with listeners so deeply because he represents something new: a return of the genuine, emotional pull of golden age R&B with fresh, forward-thinking production. With the release of his excellent three EPs in 2024, Live From 525, Anyway I Can, and For the Deported, Elmiene’s mainstream breakthrough is imminent — but his life has already been irrevocably changed since 2021, and he’s had to adapt quickly to keep the pace.
“I never really traveled that much before. Traveling wasn't a big thing in my family. We didn't really have that, ‘We're going on holiday to Spain,’” Elmiene says. “Then suddenly from that, going to LA, traveling halfway across the world and what's taken you there is your voice. Weird. Very strange. Like, what do you mean? Especially at that time — ‘Golden’ was a thing, but what is happening, really, why am I in America? I was doing like five, six studio sessions a week. Every day I was meeting someone and everyone was someone you had never met before.”
He remembers his first working session with Timbaland, in which the famed producer brought in a 15-piece band. Back then he was jet lagged and daunted — now he spends birthdays opening for SZA. It’s all in a day’s work.
The Job
The first version of Elmiene I get to speak with is brambly, a likely side effect of his unforgiving cold. He’s earnest yet sarcastic and frank. The second version of Elmiene I receive is more open, loquacious and poetic. Both versions, however, express a level of honesty about his experience as a musician in the public eye that only belongs to those who are not at all interested in the idea of celebrity.
He tells me a story about a tour stop in Atlanta, where the energy was more intense than any crowd he’d ever played, one of his first encounters with his fangirls. “They knew all the words, which, I've never had that before,” says Elmiene, adding that ATL began singing his songs before he did, and even knew the lyrics to a song that he’d released just a week before the concert. “There was a girl the whole time at the front repeatedly saying, ‘Take me. Take me.’ I don't know what that even means. Take you where?”
“[When] you're watching a movie and you're like, ‘Oh my god look at all the attention this person is getting.’ It kind of sucks. It kind of sucks, actually,” Elmiene laughs. “I don't want to say sucks because I feel like, objectively, it's something that can't. Like, these people love you. It's not really a thing that sucks, but it's definitely a nuisance. The first thought in your head isn't, ‘God this is really nice.’ Your first thought is, ‘How do I get out of this?’”
During that same tour stop, he exited through the crowd at the end of the show and stopped to sign someone’s vinyl. Suddenly, he and his tour manager were stuck in the middle of a swarm of searching hands, more vinyls to sign, even a bouquet of flowers. He quickly learned that with his growing fame, exiting through the crowd isn’t ideal anymore. “You can’t say no. Or, I can’t say no. Because how do you do that?”
, Courtesy of Def Jam</cite>](https://s.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/iMXdO3lR0e9JthpHnddJDw--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MDtoPTE3MDM-/https://media.zenfs.com/en/teen_vogue_128/dc99a56c749f6022f2f2bdac249f9bea)
“I don't have the fan bone in my body, or the fan gene, I don't even know what to call it. I can't be a fan of someone like that. I can never imagine myself— like say I see my hero, D'Angelo, walking down the street. I would never ask for a picture. I’d walk past, and I'd be like, that was amazing. In my head I'm like, maybe he'll recognize me or whatever. But the concept of there's someone going, ‘Oh my god, aaahhh,’ I can't even. It freaks me out a little bit. Like, who the f*ck am I? Why are you doing this? Legit. I just wrote a song. Let's boil it down to the roots of it all: I put words together that sound nice, and I have a nice enough voice to sing them and string them together. Then I get onstage. That's it. I'm just on an elevated stage. It's just weird to me.”
Apparently, celebrity isn’t where Elmiene draws the line — he’s not all too interested in the frills of a music career, either. “If it was up to me, there would be no music videos because I just don't give a f*ck,” he says dismissively. He hates merch. The idea of touring makes him queasy. When he made his Glastonbury debut in 2023, he and his crew “turned up with the van behind the stage,” he did his set and “went right back in the van and just disappeared.” He talks about his success with an air of absurdity and gentle confusion, as if it could all be a practical joke, but he’s committing to the bit just for the hell of it.
Back in 2021, at his first industry meeting with one of his eventual managers, Elmiene laid out exactly what he envisioned for this strange, new musical journey.
“We sat down. We’re talking, and he says, ‘You have this viral video. You're saying you don't really want a career. What do you want?’” he recalls. “I said, ‘I want to do one album and leave.’ I was thinking about Lauryn Hill. I want to make an album like [D’Angelo’s] Voodoo, but I said my one dream is to be a part of my own Soulquarians. I want that collective: D'Angelo, [Erykah] Badu, Common, [J] Dilla, The Roots, Bilal, that kind of collective. People that you know are changing music and soul. As soon as I heard Dijon, I went back to that conversation in my head. Like, holy sh*t, this is them. Then I heard the Mk.gee record and I was like, holy sh*t, this is them.”
The Art
With late October’s Anyway I Can and December’s special release For the Deported, dedicated to Sudan, Elmiene has completed his most fulfilling year as a musician yet. He’s collecting the best soul, neo soul, and R&B collaborators in the business — D’Mile, Salaam Remi, Dahi — like Infinity Stones. (“Obviously, it’s Sal Remi, but it’s the relationship between the artist that he has,” praises Elmiene. “Dahi just immediately takes it to the future… D’Mile is the Quincy Jones of our time, I would say. He’s just the one.”)
He calls For the Deported his “most natural” and “most cohesive work yet,” and in contrast, says the 8-track Anyway I Can is “the most professional project” he’s ever done, the first without the touch of any Brits besides himself, one that he feels could be subtitled: Oh Sh*t, Elmiene’s Gone to America.
Elmiene says he creatively operates under a similar ethos as Prince did: write for the vault with no restrictions. The release of Anyway I Can and For the Deported is another crag to climb to reach the mountaintop, the next step of exploration as to what kind of art he is capable of creating, and all the kinds of R&B he’s ever wanted to dive into.
When we speak again over Zoom in the summertime, it’s the eve of his 23rd birthday and he’s about “3%” done with his album. He’s taking his time to learn from each record he’s already put out into the world before going full throttle and writing “some weird left sh*t” like he did on 2023’s bonafide neo soul EP Marking My Time. He is priming his audience for his next chapter of sonic play.
While drastically different songs from Anyway I Can like “Ode to Win” and “Light Work” pushed him in practice, there are songs he is saving for his debut studio album that speak deeper to his own musical identity. He describes one such song called “Fire Away,” that he says is like “half of a Weezer song” that he’s saving for the album. “That one, no one’s ready for that yet,” he says with pride.
“I didn't know I could do ‘Light Work’ either,” he admits of the successful, up-tempo single. “Once I wrote ‘Light Work,’ I was like, ‘Whoa, what was that? That was really cool. What else can I do?’ …I think [album-writing] has been going pretty well. I'm just very much just in an experimental bag. There's a moment when an artist projects the experimental side that he's trying to show, but in a very cohesive way, and that's what I'm searching for right now. Kind of what Blonde was to Frank Ocean, where it's like, ‘What the hell is this? But also it makes perfect sense.’”
The Soul
In one of his early interviews, Elmiene once said that his litmus test for writing a song is whether or not he gets a lump in his throat. He started out as a poet. It may seem melodramatic, but it tracks; listening to Elmiene hurts.
For a 23-year-old, Elmiene has a rare gift of discernment and a beautiful fearlessness to love. This emotional audacity is alive in every lyric he writes — the texture of his voice carries the rest of the emotion to term. Listening to Elmiene is like an excavation of the heart. He sings of memory and mortality, willpower and choice, heartache and grief, self-trust and self-doubt, all emotions and human abilities that scrape our insides, that demand us to feel. This is the power of soul music. This is the power of Elmiene.
In the modern landscape of R&B, it is Elmiene’s sheer respect for the genre and its history that sets him apart from intent to execution. “For me, it's all about the root of it all, which is Soul music. That's what I strive to be. I strive to be written down in history as a Soul musician and R&B fits right under that thing,” he reflects. “That's just the continuation of Soul, and for me, the best part about Soul music is, it's in the name. It's music that makes your soul feel something. That's why I love it, there is no limit to it. The reign is endless… The fact that we can talk about Stevie and Prince and Michael Jackson and still call it all soul music or R&B, despite how vastly different it is, that's why it's the best… Even Brent Faiyaz can be compared to Stevie Wonder. This is just a genre that makes Black people feel good. That's all it is… It's very freeing, soul. More than any other genre.”
In 2018, at 84 years old, legendary musician and architect of popular music Quincy Jones told Vulture: “I have never in my life made music for money or fame. Not even Thriller. No way. God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” So far, it seems like Elmiene and God walk into the studio together with their arms linked. He’s not thinking of fame or fortune, but expansion. He wants to expand solely for himself and his collaborators, for the sake of the art, for the sake of the challenge of testing the limitation of self.
Elmiene is an artist’s artist who is using his success to nurture the soul student he’s always been since he was a teen. “I want to be remembered as just a part of the lineage, generally. If someone referenced me like I would reference Bilal, like, ‘That boy Elmiene, that kid was f*cking crazy,’” he says.
“Even if no one else is. I was that kid in the middle of f*cking Botley, Oxford— I know for a fact that not one person in a 3,000 mile radius [was] listening to this one H-Town B-side. I know I'm the only one. No one else [was] religiously listening to f*cking ‘Don't Hold Back the Rain’ for hours, listening to his voice, trying to figure out how he did that thing. No one else is doing that. If there's one kid or anyone out there who'd say that with my music… brilliant. That's all I ever really need. That'd be the best.”
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
Want more great Culture stories from Teen Vogue? Check these out:
