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Elmiene VibeZ

Elmiene sings like the last fifty years of soul music happened yesterday and he was in the room for all of it. Twenty-three tracks from one of the most striking voices to come out of Britain in years.

Oxford, Sudan, and a voice out of time

Elmiene — born Abdel Mahmoud, of Sudanese heritage and raised in Oxford — arrived almost fully formed. A cover posted online caught fire, and within a short stretch he had signed with Polydor, been championed by Virgil Abloh's Louis Vuitton, and been claimed by a lot of people as the natural inheritor of a lineage running through Donny Hathaway, D'Angelo and Frank Ocean.

The comparisons are lazy but not wrong about the essential thing: his voice has a grain and a weight that sounds like it belongs to an older recording. He phrases behind the beat, uses falsetto sparingly, and has an instinct for when to leave a line unfinished. In an era of technically flawless singing, he sounds like a person.

What to listen for

The Live From 525 sessions are the heart of this playlist and the best introduction. "Pink Matter" — the Frank Ocean song — and Prince's "Sometimes It Snows In April" are both enormous risks for a young singer, and he handles them by refusing to perform them as tributes. "Sideways" and "Slow Jam" from the same sessions are looser and just as good.

Of the originals, "Golden" and "Mama" are the emotional centre — the latter is the one that tends to stop people. "Someday" (which appears twice here, in different versions) and "Crystal Tears" show the writing developing.

"Marking My Time" in the BADBADNOTGOOD edit is the most interesting production on the list — the Toronto band's jazz instincts give him a much rougher, more live setting than his studio records usually allow.

"Sweetness" with Leon Thomas pairs him with another singer having a moment, and "Why (Spare Me Tears)" and "TLC" close out the more recent material.

Twenty-three tracks. Headphones, please.

Go deeper

His EPs — Marking My Time and For the Loving and the Lost — are short and worth hearing complete. The Live From 525 session is the single best introduction and should be watched as well as heard.

For the lineage the comparisons point at: Donny Hathaway Live is the record that everything in this tradition measures itself against. D'Angelo's Voodoo and Frank Ocean's Blonde are the modern poles.

Among his British contemporaries, Sam Wills, Bellah and Shae Universe are part of the same wave. And for the Sudanese thread, Sinkane and Alsarah & the Nubatones are worth finding — different music entirely, same diaspora.

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