Photo Credit: Brian Kinywa
Words by: Cat Woods
Riding a wave of awards, years of live performance, and a phenomenal debut EP, Kenyan-born Australian singer-songwriter Elsy Wameyo delivers her highly anticipated debut album, Saint Sinner. And as expected, she doesn’t let us down.
In early 2018, Wameyo began releasing tracks to an unsuspecting public, starting with her debut single, “Intuition.” She then released “Outcast” a year later, followed by “Pastor” in 2020. Growing up African in the sometimes insular city of Adelaide, South Australia has fueled much of Wameyo’s drive. She has channeled her experiences of oppression and prejudice into her sharp, insightful songwriting.
By the time she released her self-produced debut EP Nilotic in April 2022, Australian fans of R&B, hip hop and soul were already intrigued. Across six tracks, Wameyo explored her Nilotic heritage and, with her signature fearlessness, she called out a culture of suppressing Black voices and the socially sanctioned police violence that is prevalent in Australia, America, and beyond. The EP was both daring and courageous, serving as a powerful bass-heavy clarion call to the dance floor. It earned her several Australian awards, including six wins at the South Australia Music Awards for Best Studio Engineer/Producer, Best Music Video, Best Song, Best Solo Artist, and Best Release. She was later voted Unearthed Artist of the Year by youth radio station “triple j.”
After two years of lockdowns —during which Australia endured some of the most stringent restrictions globally— Wameyo longed for freedom, travel and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the emotional, spiritual and cultural nourishment of her birthplace. Raised in Nairobi until the age of 7, when her family moved to Adelaide, Wameyo has vivid formative memories of places, people, and its atmosphere. She is both Kenyan and Australian, a protester and a church-going, family-oriented woman—a saint, a sinner, and everything in between. Wameyo embodies the diasporic experience many people face, navigating between physical homes while grappling with a complex, unsettled sense of f what home truly means.
“I don’t think I’ve ever thought of myself as Australian,” she tells CONE over a video call from Kenya. “If anything, I’d call myself Kenyan-Australian. But the more that I’ve stayed over here [in Nairobi], I recognize that I’m truly Kenyan and I can’t run away from that. I have so much gratitude for Australia, for the love and support. I could never look down upon that. In terms of values and culture, I’m much closer to Kenya than Australia for sure. I’ve danced across different worlds, and I’ve been lost in the seas. I really believe that home is heaven. If I try to bind myself to Australia or Kenya, I’ll always feel lost.”
Wameyo continues, “I came to Kenya in February 2023, not specifically to make the album. I relocated because I was stressed out and disillusioned. By the end of 2022, I had been touring extensively, both solo and as a support act for Hilltop Hoods, who were selling out arenas nationally. I was also involved in a theater production. Managing three tours simultaneously was overwhelming, both physically and mentally. By the end of the year, I felt drained and uninspired, so I decided to go to Kenya, where I could escape the pressure and focus on what I wanted to do.”
Although Wameyo returned to Australia to tour with Genesis Owusu in December 2023 and joined Hilltop Hoods on their European tour in June and July of last year, she now considers Kenya her new home or “pivot point.” “It feels like a complete change,” she says of planting roots in Kenya. “I feel like I’ve started anew. It feels like home because it is home.”
She adds, “When I arrived in Kenya, I planned to write an album, but I didn’t fully understand what it would become. I started with documents containing words, sentences, poems—things reflecting my feelings. I had sections labeled ‘Saints,’ ‘Sinners,’ and also an ‘In Between’ category for that gray area where things didn’t quite fit.”
In Naivasha, Kenya, Wameyo collaborated with producers, songwriters and musicians to create a cohesive and comprehensive display of her diverse interests and talents. Wuod Omollo, Motez, Fancy Fingers (Polycarp Otieno), and Ywaya Tajiri all contributed to realizing Wameyo’s vision.
One of the key tracks, “Umva,” translates from the Burundi to “listen,” which encapsulates the message and process of Saint Sinner. It serves as an invitation to approach her music and words with an open mind and spirit—free from assumptions, ready to truly listen. Wameyo describes early stages of the creative process as “crucial,” especially when she communicated her most personal experiences to the producers and writers she was unfamiliar with. “I was trying to figure out what I was feeling, and at the same time, [explain the emotions] to these people I had never met,” she explains “So, I had to basically spill out my whole life as much as I could, as quickly as I could. I had this document that spoke to family, to music, to my hobbies, and then I had another document, which was specifically around the music.”
After the team sat with Wameyo’s extensive notes for two weeks, they set up camp for an additional two weeks to intensively craft Saint Sinner. “We basically went to Nakuru, which is two hours from Nairobi, and stayed in a two-story AirBnB in the middle of the wild. There were zebras walking around, monkeys. You felt like you were in the middle of nowhere. We had routines, though: wake up, go for a run to the lake, workout, come back, pray, eat breakfast and start our sessions. We also had managers there making sure we took breaks, too.”
Wameyo and Tajiri worked upstairs, while producers Omollo and Otieno handled the beats and composition downstairs. “The beautiful thing was that when we were creating, every time we felt lost in any way, we would always open up that document,” Wameyo recalls. “When I went downstairs, the producers would say, ‘we’ve got these songs for you today,’ and they would explain to me why they came up with that song based on my document. So, those beautiful connections came about in such a short amount of time.”
The singer-songerwriter calls Saint Sinner a “level up” from Nilotic. “There’s common ground between the focus on that duality of the strength and the weakness. Nilotic was definitely a time of a lot of strength, but also a lot of weakness. As a Christian in the world, we talk about how when you go to God feeling weak, it’s in him that you’re made stronger,” Wameyo says. “I feel like that’s the same walk that I had during Nilotic and Saint Sinner. I think Nilotic was a time where I knew who I was, and I knew what I wanted to say, but there was a brokenness to me.”
This brokenness was not her burden alone, though. She describes “the brokenness” as a plea to God. It represents “me going to God and crying,” she explains, “whereas I feel like Nilotic was just me as me. There’s a bit more clarity, now that I’ve made this move to Kenya.”
This newfound clarity is reflected in both the lyrics and the bold, propulsive nature of the music. Wameyo elaborates on this concept, saying, “Sonically, it’s all about tension. There’s trumpets, symphonies, angels singing, and there’s also a sense of dirtiness to the friction, distortion, warped movement, violins, bass, and electro sounds. I knew the feeling I wanted to create, which is tension, but also something holy and spiritual that’s also dirty and distorted.”
As Wameyo prepares to embark on a European, UK and Australian tour—exposing her to thousands of new fans— she harbors hopes that fans and the people closest to her will listen to her album and appreciate her complexity as a woman, an artist, a sister and a daughter. “At the bottom of my heart, if I could hope for anyone to listen it would be my family as a whole,” she reflects. “That would be very special, but that’s usually just not the case. It’s biblical, our family are usually the ones most distant to us, the least connected to us.” Also, she hopes Kendrick Lamar will hear her debut EP, she adds with a laugh.
Ultimately, she says, this album is fundamentally for one person: Elsy Wameyo. “I didn’t create this album for anyone. It was me trying to heal and make myself whole again, find God again. I know people will hear it and love it and they’ll get to know Elsy, but I understand that this was for me. If anyone finds healing through it, that’s a blessing.”