Elmiene’s voice is undeniable. Born Abdala Elamin and raised in Oxford since the age of 5, the now 21-year-old has been called on for his sweetly soulful croons, since his living room concert days, singing Young Money’s ‘Bedrock’ with his cousins, or going micro-viral at secondary school for his cover of Michael Jackson’s ‘Man in the Mirror’ in music class. And yet, despite his love of performance and a knack for poetry and writing, it wasn’t until he was discovered via his effortlessly silken cover videos on social media that he realised he could merge the worlds of his words and melodies and shape a future for himself. The next chapter of unearthing who he was as an artist was another fairly speedy one. Within the span of a week, he’d experimented with incorporating spoken word alongside singing on a track, then just spoken word over an instrumental. And then it hit him: “I realised that marrying the two doesn’t have to mean them being separate things, like water and oil in a song. It could be the same thing. And the first song after that was ‘Golden.'”

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