It’s a mid-afternoon in March, and Elmiene is in a conference room at Def Jam’s Los Angeles office. He’s dressed in a crisp black t-shirt and seated at the head of the table. He appears relaxed, leaning back in a chair, his hands interlaced behind his head. Behind him hangs a large poster of Public Enemy’s 1988 classic album, It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.
It’s been a busy day for the rising R&B singer, who’s been doing pressers, filming content and signing vinyl inserts for his debut album, Sounds for Someone, with Sharpies sprawled across the table. “It’s going to be a crazy statement now,” he quips before we dive into our conversation. Even with a demanding schedule surrounding his album release (March 20), followed by a headline tour, the 24-year-old finds moments where he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
The British-Sudanese singer, born Abdala Elamin, became a viral sensation in 2021 after posting a splendid cover of D’Angelo’s immortal classic “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” At the time, he was a student at Bournemouth University, studying creative writing, with no intent of pursuing a music career. In fact, at that time, he hadn’t written or recorded music. Even the video cover captured his first stab at singing into a microphone. But destiny had other plans, leading to a deal with Polydor Records in partnership with Def Jam.
Elmiene has spent the last couple of years honing his craft as a singer, songwriter and pianist. It’s poetic in the sense that it all started with a cover with blank pages waiting to be filled. He describes his time developing his artistry as “gradual yet turbulent.” He adds, “It [hasn’t been] very long, but the amount of change and things I had to go through in the middle of it have been so numerous where it’s like I’ve had to pick up my pace while still feeling that, okay, still just starting, but the mix of both.”
Since 2023, Elmiene has released four studio EPs — EL-MEAN, Marking My Time, Anyway I Can, For The Deported — and a few live projects. Although these aren’t fully realized works like an album, the heart and soul are felt throughout. They are gems for day ones to cherish and for future fans to rediscover as they join his expanding base. Each EP is a dot connected in a wider vision he’s had leading up to his grand debut.
“The titles of those projects [were] all intentional: Marking My Time, Anyway I Can, For The Deported. It was a sentence I was forming across all the EPs where those songs [were] me building the foundation of what I am now [and what] I feel like I’m doing intentionally in Sounds for Someone,” he says.
Elmiene started working on Sounds for Someone in early 2025 and continued through the early summer. “It took me about seven months for all the songs to be written and finished,” he says. His philosophy in creating centers on starting from a blank mind slate, which allows him to follow where the music takes him. This case was no different. “The only intent I had at the beginning was making sure I had the right people around me. I knew if I had that, everything else would work itself out.”
With No I.D. as the album’s executive producer, the creative circle grew to include Raphael Saadiq, Jeff “Gitty” Gitelman, Sampha, Andrew Aged, Buddy Ross and Ghostnote. As far as assembling the team, Elmiene says, “I was really clueless, to be honest. I just knew if you [could] give me chords I’m excited about, then you’re in.”
When Elmiene announced Sounds for Someone in January, he revealed that making the album was painful but necessary. When asked about the most agonizing part of the process, he responds, “Finding out I needed to talk about these things in the first place. Everyone thinks they’re OK until they find out they’re not.” About seven songs into the writing process, he realized the theme that was crystallizing.
Sounds for Someone is deeply inspired by Elmiene’s complicated relationship with his late father. The cover art shows Elmiene standing on elevated terrain by the sea, wearing a kaftan while waving a white flag. He got the idea from one of his favorite manga, One Piece. “It’s a specific scene where this character waves the flag to represent the passing of their father that they’re proud of, but also the feeling that they’re not giving up and always going to live on in the memory of him.”
As for the flag itself, Elmiene, who is Muslim, shares, “In my culture and religion, when someone passes away, we wash the body and wrap it in three wide sheets. The flag is actually split; it’s three wide sheets sewed into each other. There’s obviously the connotations of peace, but also me holding up that as a way of understanding moving on and in the mourning, all of the above is really what it is.”
The gut-wrenching “Cry Against The Wind” finds him suspended between grief and regret. He previously explained, “It’s about a mistake that I know is too late to truly be forgiven for. We all sometimes have to live with things we can’t fix but acknowledging and accepting that is heavy, like a strong wind you can never turn away from.” The song’s production begins with welling tears before it erupts into a full cry. “I felt like I needed context for the first part,” he says. “The emotions I was exploring in the second part… felt too expansive on its own to just have within the same chords and sound of the first part.”
As personal as the album is, especially in relation to his father, he doesn’t get too heady. There’s a sense of wanting to be universal, in a way that allows fans to fill in that someonefor themselves. “I was like, ‘I want it to be broader than the specifics of what I’m talking about. I don’t want this to be the ‘dad album.’ I want it to be wider than that, and the title would help it be that,’” Elmiene says.
Aside from contemplating familial dynamics, he explores themes of romance. On the tender “Special,” co-written by Saadiq, who plays the bass, Elmiene wakes his partner up early in the morning for a day of fellowship. It underscores the thrilling adventure that love brings, where doing something special doesn’t have to be a holiday.
“‘Special’ went through many versions where the main song was done very quickly,” he reveals. It was initially going to be the intro for the album but developed into a full song. The early version was more stripped down. “We couldn’t find what the right drums were. So it was just this soft, lovely song. But I was like, ‘No, man. This song has more potential than that.’ That took a long time to figure out. No I.D. was the one that really put the key in and unlocked it with the drums. That took it to a world where it was like, ‘I know what to do with the hook.’”
“Time Doesn’t Heal,” a bluesy, acoustic-laden ballad, reflects on the aftermath of a relationship. “I felt like I needed a song like that that kind of breaks down. It has a brilliant melody and really good songwriting. That’s all it has to stand on. It’s the same as Tony Rich Project’s “Nobody Knows,” that vibe of just a great song. You can sing with just the guitar or the keys and it all carries the same amount of power.”
“Don’t Say Maybe” trades the deep emotion for something a little more upbeat. The piano stabs and handclaps are met by hard-hitting percussion. It knocks, it chants, it moves, it has a hip-hop punch with a pop rush. It feels like a deep exhale that would be reverberated in a stadium. “That was the last full song I wrote for the album,” Elmiene reveals. “It was the last day of working on the project, and No I.D. was like, ‘We need to write a vowel song.’ I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he was like, ‘Songs like Umbrella, ella, ella… these songs that have repetition of vowels. Those are stadium songs. They’re the songs that really move, but you don’t have one on the album.’”
Crowds will be able to chant “Don’t Say Maybe,” and much more, when he embarks on his Sounds for Someone Tour across North America this spring. “I’m excited for the freedom I have on this tour,” he says. “I have a band that’s very excited to switch things up at the drop of a hat. Our plan already is to do a different cover for every show. We’re just having a good time and a blast this time.”
Even with his sold-out tour approaching, Elmiene is more grounded in his artistic mission than ever before. “I think any artist with integrity should express themselves in the most honest, articulate way. I feel like all of our missions are only doable within our limbs and whatever we can do in our little circle. My calling is to keep writing honest music to the best of my ability, and if there’s anything that will follow from that, it will follow.”
Listen to Elmiene’s Sounds for Someone here.
Featured Photo Credit: Andres Castillo