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For so many musicians, the breakup is the wake-up. Taylor Swift is one, this album proves Omar Apollo is another. The latter’s new album is a clutch of buffered aspirins for a broken heart. After his critically acclaimed 2022 debut Ivory, the young American’s second full-length effort dives a little deeper, and plunders much sweeter sorrow. As a singer-songwriter Apollo (full name Omar Apolonio Velasco) is an inveterate heartbroken heartbreaker. And while God Said No reinforces his rep for lonely R&B ballads, the 27 year-old from Indiana aims further than the crooner cycle this time. Sure, longstanding (and valid) Frank Ocean parallels still abound, as on Plane Trees and While U Can. But Drifting and Less of You, with their ghostly vocoder choruses evoking American Gigolo-era Giorgio Moroder, are particularly fun highlights. These moments of brash, Euro-pop-phoria match Apollo’s energy and vibrato. God Said No is delicate and pretty, but there is a lightness to it that makes it feel, at times, insubstantial; the material stretched thin over a vast horizons of longing and loss.
