Album Review: Omar Apollo’s ‘God Said No’ — The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Prince

Omar Apollo breaks his own heart open for his sophomore record God Said No, “Drifting” through the confusing, consuming, and frustrating stages of grief.

Written by William Beachum

It’s a great year to be a queer pop artist from the Midwest. Hailing from a low-income community in Hobart, Indiana, Omar Apollo will never face allegations of being an industry plant. He lived in an attic and collected cash from his jobs at Jimmy John’s and McDonald’s to release his song “Ugotme” on Spotify in 2017. A slew of early singles gained traction through a natural groundswell on SoundCloud and Spotify, leading up to the release of his debut EP Apolonio in 2020. On his early projects like Apolonio, the soulster leaned more heavily into bedroom pop — adhering to the genre’s name by literally creating pop music from his bedroom. Apollo transcends to a more grounded R&B vision on 2022’s Ivory and his latest release, God Said No, incorporating Latin American musical influences and trap production.

Apollo spearheaded Ivory’s triumph with the breakout success of “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me)” on TikTok, which earned the singer his first and only spot on the Billboard Hot 100, a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, and a gig opening for SZA’s “SOS” tour. The success of “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me)” and its accompanying viral “Tiny Desk” performance guided the direction of his new album, God Said No: crushed and trailing vocals, intentional use of silence, and psychological use of atmosphere.

God Said No feels cinematic on an essential level, painting each song as a different stage in the decay of a deeper love. While Apollo has expressed that this album is not about one singular relationship or experience, its cohesive ideals about grief follow a story structure. The aftermath of death doesn’t encompass Apollo’s vision of grief. On his latest album, Apollo defines a loss of love as living in a state of grief — exploring its denial, frustration, confusion, wallowing, and ultimate acceptance. As he croons on “Dispose of Me,” “It don’t matter if it's 25 years, 25 months / It don’t matter if it's 25 days, it was real love.” Apollo demands a grief process for any sort of love, artistically rendering it on God Said No.

The singer-songwriter establishes the extent and care of his emotions on the lightly trotting opener “Be Careful With Me.” It breaks open the album with gentle guitar plucks and a silently hypnotic vocal pattern. On the sonic exterior, the song operates similarly to Apollo’s public persona — nonchalant and gentle. But as the song’s title alludes, people in Apollo’s life must “be careful with him” and anticipate the emotional impact their love, even if fleeting, has on his psyche. He prioritizes respecting the grieving process, urging his audience to “no matter the space / [not] feel it lesser.” Through this opener, Apollo debunks the myth that his public persona and musical identity are separate. While his celebrity self may be less openly vulnerable, he is still feeling everything deeply under his casual surface.

After expressing his anger on lead single “Spite” over a bouncy electric guitar and chanting vocals, he moves on to his confusion surrounding the arrival of grief on “Less of You.” The lack of distinct expectations for the relationship at hand leaves Apollo in a lyrical and sonic frenzy, disturbing him as he is haunted by the question, “Was last night the end of me and you?” Even though he is still “undressing” his partner, he sees “less of [him].” The bouncy, neurotic, and bright synth pattern reflects his nebulous thoughts' scattered and rapid nature. The repetition of the reverb-dunked confession that “[he]’s still got a lot to say / don’t wanna end the night this way” builds upon this pattern, elevating the song to a level of uncertainty that successfully provokes the listener until it forces them to move or dance away from it. “Less of You” effectively acts as a danceable single and an inward rumination, contributing to God Said No’s versatility.

Apollo breezes through a denial-shadowed and John Mayer-backed “Done With You,” relating a false sense of sonic acceptance to the audience through bright horns and a playful vocal delivery. He follows it up with the desolate and devastating “Plane Trees (feat. Mustafa),” which he wrote after hearing stories about his mom’s childhood growing up in Mexico. The track is sparse, save for some subtle backing strings and light guitar picks, leaving the balladeer’s voice with a looming sense of space that mirrors the distance he feels between him and his partner. The music calms down like a dropping heartbeat, a reverberation of piling vocals overlapping until they dissipate over the enveloping sense of space. A sister to the album’s closer “Glow” thematically, “Plane Trees (Feat. Mustafa)” is the first time the singer confronts the harsh idea of permanently losing this love. Only under this tree, which “brings life to withered leaves,” does he truly understand the harsh reality of their “dying” love. Despite the decay, “their presence made the ground glow,” setting the stage for the themes he explores in the album’s closer. Apollo weaves these motifs throughout the album with an incredible delicacy, presenting a new side of the songwriter.

“Drifting,” a fan favorite and personal standout, exists in a liminal space, painting a sonic picture of a man slowly drowning through synthetic tides. Sampling “Edge of the Ocean” by indie band Ivy, “Drifting” is submerged under the weight of Apollo’s exhaustion with the extent of his devotion. He’s “tired of climbing,” but “he can’t let go,” leaving him “Drifting.”The song whirls around with an unsettling, repetitive quality. Apollo has a unique ability to craft a scene with his sonic landscapes without directly describing it, with ‘Drifting” existing as the strongest example of this in the album with its guttural, crawling, and creeping instrumental anxieties.

“Empty” also establishes an incredible sense of atmosphere, with the song feeling weightless as it “floats so high” that it “cloud[s] [his] piece of mind.” The airy environment demonstrates how the SoundCloud native feels weightless or “empty,” both at the peaks of his love and at the bottom of his heart. However, “Empty” feels much less lyrically complex than its peers on the album. Even if it is intentionally simple to connote his emptiness, the song is too simple to stand out on lyrics alone.

While the poetic cohesion is new for Apollo, his knack for musical versatility is not.“Against Me” disrupts a streak of ballads before entering into the tender and gorgeous “While U Can.” Apollo can briefly come out on the other side of his grief on “Against Me,” the closest thing to Ivory’s Tyler, The Creator endorsed “Tamagotchi” on the LP. He recognizes his worth even while sitting in his grief, providing a much-needed levity to the project. He boasts that he “can not act like [he]’s average / [he] knows that [he] is the baddest bitch.” Even if ideologically simple, his lyrical refusal to demean himself presents growth from his strategy on “Be Careful With Me” to “be someone” his partner “liked.”

The album’s prioritization of painting cinematic landscapes sometimes disrupts the direction and flow of the album. This fault becomes clear on “How”, which sounds unnaturally cheap in its production, attempting to create a feeling of disbelief sonically. A tinny synth pattern bounces off the song's walls, attempting to reflect the pop star’s unclear state of mind and envy for how his partner is normally “living [his] life.” The sonic modeling of emotional uncertainty feels vibrant and slick on “Less of You,” but fails to do so on “How,” making the track’s place in the album feel demeaned. “How” interrupts the space and reflection that the other final tracks, “Dispose of Me,” Pedro,” and “Glow” provide. This sacrifice of flow does not lead to any other further lyrical or emotional ideals, presenting a lack of curation.

The penultimate track features a voice memo from actor Pedro Pascal in which the actor describes a grief that “brought him to his knees” and made him feel like “there wasn’t any moment past that moment.” The track provides both a decentering of Apollo’s narrative and a nice way to bring newer fans to the album with a celebrity voice note.

The closer “Glow” ties many of the album’s themes together, even if easily compared to rumored lover Frank Ocean’s album closer “White Ferrari.” Tying back to the fifth track “Plane Trees (Feat. Mustafa),” the crooner reflects that he and his partner are “silent like the trees.” While sitting under the trees, he pleads with his partner to give him “one more dance.” Apollo begs for an opportunity like this throughout the album, whether it’s not to be “dispose[d] of” on “Dispose of Me” or to be “[held] while [he] can” on “While U Can.” This declaration and its renditions climb up a synthesized ladder and then dissipate into the soundscape, leaving only his mother’s voice at the end of the album. He references his mother’s childhood he described on “Plane Trees (Feat. Mustafa)” in this moment, leaving him to “Glow” in the promise of life and death that roots both nature and love.

God Said No stands out because of its precise and labored commitment to sonic atmosphere. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Apollo said that he now feels like “he’s an album artist” as opposed to his more “experimental, fun days of releasing singles whenever he wants.” This artistic progression towards creating more cohesive artistic statements explains this album’s commitment to thematic cohesion and colorful instrumental choices. While God Said No might not have the pure hits that Ivory had (“Evergreen,” “Tamagotchi”), it’s a much more cohesive artistic statement from Apollo. He has made it a part of his craft to create songs that feel like scenes — a skill he may get to show off in the new Luca Guadagnino (“Challengers,” “Call Me By Your Name”) movie entitled “Queer.” This skill is shown off throughout the tracklist, highlighted on cuts like “While U Can,” where he paints the scene of two lovers in a bed, one asking to be tenderly held. “Life’s Unfair” paints the scene of a reflective road trip with a breezy environment but a twisted mind. While this commitment to atmosphere can backfire, like on “How,” God Said No effectively creates a visual and emotional landscape in which listeners have the space to process their grief. God Said No is an album about progression through precision — both in Apollo’s journey as an artist as well as his personal journey with grief.

Album ReviewsAfterglow ATXJuly 9, 2024william beachum, album review, r&b