Jinmi Abduls Wants to Be Remembered for One Thing: Originality

Ask Jinmi Abduls about Renaissance, and he doesn’t begin with the music.

Instead, he talks about influence. Not just from musicians, but from filmmakers, dancers and other creatives whose work has quietly shaped the way he sees art. For him, Renaissance is more than the title of a six-track EP; it’s the beginning of a new creative chapter.

“Renaissance is an era for me, an era of artistic rebirth.”

For years, he had held tightly to the influences that first shaped him. Then something shifted.

“For the first time in a long time, I got new influences. I got very new influences. I feel like the influences I previously had were all leading this way. That’s why Renaissance, for me, is not just about the music, but also about the creative direction, which is born of the influences in this period of my life.”

Despite describing the project as a rebirth, Jinmi is quick to point out that it doesn’t mean he has become a different artist.

“It’s always the same, Jinmi, the same Jinmi that pays attention to detail. The same Jinmi who believes very much in quality and excellence. It’s always the same Jinmi who has an eye for aesthetics. It’s the same Jinmi, but evolving across eras.”

That idea of evolution rather than reinvention quietly runs through the entire conversation. Whether he’s discussing songwriting, artwork, or the music industry itself, he keeps returning to one belief: becoming more himself rather than becoming someone else.

That philosophy also explains why listeners often assume every Jinmi Abdul’s record is autobiographical.

“My music is very personal, but not always very personal; many of the songs I put out are actually about other people’s love. I write about other people’s heartbreaks and disappointments.”

At the heart of it all, he sees himself as one thing above everything else.

“I’m just a storyteller, sometimes it’s my story, and sometimes it’s other people’s stories.”

That same attention to storytelling extends beyond the songs themselves. The visual identity of Renaissance reunited him with designer SDQ_Ade, who also worked on the artwork for one of his earliest projects back in 2017. For Jinmi, the partnership was less about nostalgia and more about shared values.

“I like the idea of working with a team of people where each of us is excellent at our work. Excellence comes from paying attention to detail, consistently.”

He believes that attention to detail is visible in everything they created together.

“I can definitely see in his art that he has an eye for detail. So do I. It doesn’t sound too crazy when I’m expressing my ideas to him because I always have a whole lot of ideas.”

Reuniting for Renaissance felt like the right decision because, in his mind, the project belongs alongside the defining moments of his catalogue.

“I genuinely feel like this is a new Jinmi, the same way Jinmi of Lagos became a classic. I feel like Renaissance is going to go down in history as a classic. It only felt right that I bring out my best guns.”

Even the artwork carries meaning beneath its simplicity.

While many would naturally associate “Renaissance” with European art history, Jinmi deliberately avoided creating something that leaned too heavily on that imagery.

“I wanted to express simplicity. I wanted to express timelessness,” he says.

The crimson backdrop, his braided hairstyle, and even the typography all became symbols of this particular era in his life. Looking back, he says each project can almost be identified by the hairstyle he wore while making it.

“When I look back at my album covers, I can easily identify whatever era of my life I was in by the hairstyle I had then.”

Ironically, a project that feels so carefully assembled came together remarkably quickly.

“The whole Renaissance project, believe it or not, was created in 48 hours. I feel like something came down from heaven and entered me.”

Locked away for two days, he recorded almost every song that would eventually make the EP.

The exception was “Hold You”, which had to be completed years later, after another collaboration was removed from the project.

That made it the hardest song to finish.

“I had to tap into the headspace I was in when I created the previous songs; I’m in a different headspace now. It wasn’t a bad headspace, just a different one.”

If there is one record he believes best introduces listeners to his world, though, it isn’t “Hold You”. It’s “Saru”.

The song has travelled much further than he ever imagined, finding listeners across continents despite being sung largely in Yoruba.

He recalls children in Zanzibar using the song in a viral video that eventually inspired people around the world to create their own versions.

“People in China, Italy, India… everywhere are making videos with the song, they may not even know what I’m singing, but they’re connecting with it.”

For Jinmi, that says something powerful about music itself.

Emotion travels further than language.

His commitment to originality, however, hasn’t always been the easiest road to take.

“Originality has come at a cost,” he admits.

He believes conformity would probably have made his career easier. Chasing trends might have opened more mainstream doors, but it would also have pulled him away from the artist he wanted to become.

“At the core of who Jinmi is, one word you can use as a summary is quality,” he says. “Quality. Quality. Quality.”

It’s a word he repeats deliberately.

“I may not be turning out music as quickly as the mainstream would require, but I’d rather pay attention to quality. It’s a slower journey to create quality because you have to consistently pay attention to detail.”

That choice has naturally positioned him within Nigeria’s alternative music scene, something he has learnt not only to accept but to appreciate.

“My fans are truly fans of Jinmi Abduls, they know what they’re looking for when they come to listen to my music.”

He believes that approach has given his catalogue something trends rarely achieve.

“Shelf life.”

“People are still sentimental about songs I released years ago. That’s the benefit of creating timeless music.”

As the conversation moves beyond music itself, Jinmi turns his attention to an issue he believes deserves more discussion within Afrobeats: mental health.

For him, one of the biggest pressures artists face today isn’t simply social media or visibility. It’s learning to separate the person from the brand.

“The industry sees you as a brand,” he says. “But you’re also a person.”

When those two identities become intertwined, he believes success and failure stop belonging to the work and start affecting the individual behind it.

“If the brand fails, the person starts believing they have failed.”

It’s something he says he struggled with earlier in his career before learning to create healthier boundaries.

Comparison, he adds, is another trap artists constantly face.

“My goal every day is to be as Jinmi as I can possibly be.”

It’s a simple sentence, but perhaps the one that best captures everything he has said over the course of the conversation.

As Renaissance celebrates artistic rebirth, Jinmi insists that rebirth isn’t about abandoning who you were. It’s about becoming a better version of yourself without sacrificing your identity along the way.

That idea returns once more when he’s asked how he hopes people will remember him years from now.

His answer comes in the form of a metaphor.

“There are billions of stars,” he says. “No two stars have the same composition.”

To him, that’s what originality really means.

“I’m not trying to be like any other star. I just acknowledge that I am me.”

He hopes people never look back on his catalogue and see someone chasing whatever sound happened to dominate the moment. Instead, he wants them to remember an artist who stayed true to his ideas, his inspirations and his own voice.

“When people look back at my music in retrospect,” he says, “I hope they see originality.”

For an artist who describes Renaissance as an artistic rebirth, perhaps that’s the greatest statement the project makes.

Not that Jinmi Abduls has become someone new.

But that, with every era, he continues becoming more unmistakably himself.

Listen to his new EP Renaissance