Omar Apollo Plays Through The Pain

Omar Apollo was heartbroken last summer. This wasn’t the first time, of course. (The guy who wrote “Evergreen,” maybe the saddest song to ever blow-up on TikTok, is someone who feels things deeply.) But there was one major difference: This time he was rich. “To be completely honest,” the 27-year-old singer says, “I just started getting crazy amounts of money. I’d get booked for these private parties. The song was going crazy, I did campaigns. Merch was insane. I was like, ‘I could do whatever I want in this life right now. I could book a studio for a month that’s $2,500 a day and not even think about it.’” And so he did exactly that, running away from his home in Pasadena to London, where he distilled that bloody heartache into the year’s biggest surprise, God Said No, that rare album you can both cry and have sex to.

Apollo thrives in contradictions. Before he was opening for SZA or wearing custom Loewe to the Met Gala, he was Omar Apolonio Velasco, the son of Mexican immigrants who’d fled gang violence in Guadalajara. He grew up an artsy queer kid in a part of rural Indiana that Omar describes as “meth vibes.” When he was younger, his mom worked as a lunch lady at his school; his dad delivered food for that same cafeteria. There was a lot of God talk.

As he tells it — on a Zoom from Australia where he’s currently on tour, sleepy-eyed in a black hoodie just hours after stepping off stage — the scene plays out like a coming-of-age story by way of Sundance: Apollo, a pez out of water in the Midwest, writing songs on an acoustic guitar he scored at a pawn shop. “There was no Mexicans around,” he says, “I was called ugly all the time. All the time, like every day.” He uploaded his first songs to SoundCloud in high school, but after one of his love songs got people in the conservative Catholic community whispering, Apollo made sure to obscure the pronouns. Of that time, he says, “I had a lot of anger and resentment towards my family and the people that I loved.”

At 19, Apollo got a job at a Guitar Center, sleeping in a friend’s attic for $150 a month (asbestos included). He was so broke he had to borrow $30 to get his music up on Spotify. While the tracks started to pop off pretty quickly, it was a “super confusing” time, he says. He’d get invited to these hot parties, going “into a beautiful house and having a wonderful conversation and then go back to living in the attic with black mold.” But it was also an inflection point, or really the awakening of his power. “Everyone who was rich wanted to work with me,” he says. “I wasn’t rich yet. But they knew I had something. It was the simplest idea: I have something that you don’t have.”

In 2019, Apollo moved to Los Angeles, and Ivory, his major label debut, came out in 2022. The album scored Apollo a Best New Artist nomination at the Grammy Awards, introducing him as an empath and a truth teller. But making the album had been a torturous process. Apollo wrote (and discarded) the first draft entirely; having solicited too many opinions, he’d lost the plot. So, he holed up in the Oregon woods and started anew, suffering sleepless nights and anxiety attacks while he wrote. He played the finished record for almost no one before sharing it with his label — which explains its innocence.

Ivory is a record made by someone still asking “Do I belong here?” That’s what makes God Said No such a welcome thrill. Apollo’s no longer hoping to be invited to the party — he’s hosting. And it’s gonna be a good time. When asked about his evolution since Ivory, Apollo says there’s a clear throughline between the two records, a “spiritual thread.” Ivory invoked the image of an elephant, he explained: “Elephants don’t know their size. They’re really sensitive creatures and have small eyes. They don’t know they can be destructive, or be any kind of force that could damage anything.” OK. When did Apollo realize he could swing his trunk then? He smiles: “When did the ego come to the surface? My ego’s always been there.”

“Everyone who was rich wanted to work with me. It was the simplest idea: I have something that you don’t have.”

God Said No was written and recorded over three heartbroken months in London, a period in which Apollo got deep into the poetry of Mary Oliver and Ocean Vuong as he tried to get over the guy he says he would’ve married. There are shades of Kate Bush, Jeff Buckley, and Lana Del Rey on the album. But the project is firmly Apollo’s, and it plays like an open wound dressed by Jonathan Anderson: sad, sweaty, and f*cking chic. The guy’s secret sauce (other than being 6-foot-5 and having no discernible pores) is the way his come-closer voice makes the pain go down so smoothly. On “Done With You,” he repeats that phrase 16 times in the chorus. On “Glow,” he pleads, “Before you leave, give me one more dance.” Meanwhile, “Be Careful With Me” may be the saddest opening track in recent memory, as Apollo sings: “I tried to be someone you liked.”

Setting aside the obvious — who would kick Omar Apollo out of bed? — was Apollo really ready to settle down with this dude? “You gotta understand,” Apollo says, “my grandma got married at 16. I’m grown.”

Producer Blake Slatkin, who won a Grammy for Lizzo’s “About Damn Time,” has worked with Apollo since 2018. And that vulnerability is what initially drew him to the then-unknown artist. “I remember hearing his song ‘Brakelights,’ where it’s just about his car doesn’t have brakelights and it doesn’t go fast and why would you want me. It had such a nostalgia to it and was so earnest and honest. Whenever I see an artist that’s willing to say things that might be uncomfortable — and be willing to do that for their art — that’s the artist I jump at.”

Slatkin wrote several songs with Apollo for God Said No, continuing: “This album — it’s the ultimate version of that. I watched him go through it every day, and I watched him spare nothing. We were in the studio having a lot of conversations that were dark and sad. And there was nothing that we said in the room that he would leave out. Every lyric of ‘Dispose of Me.’ I remember him going into the booth and just saying, ‘You’re making me feel insecure in a way I haven’t felt this way in years’ — whatever the lyric is. And all of us kind of losing our breath. To be thrown away? It’s a hard thing to admit to yourself. Not only is he admitting that, but he’s pleading not to do it. It’s such a hard thing to talk about, let alone sing about, let alone release it to the entire world.”

The week after it debuted, God Said No was the third highest-selling vinyl record, ahead of Billie Eilish and Charli XCX, proving his cool kid bona fides in one swoop (and also that queer people buy a lot of vinyl). For a breakup record, God Said No has a bouncy, summertime feel. But perhaps the album connected with audiences so intensely because it’s ultimately about what comes after heartache: discovering your self-worth. Or as he raps on “Against Me,” “I am the baddest bitch, Goyard my trunk I be travelin’.” Pack up.

“I think ‘Done With You’ is a great example of that. And of how much fun we were having in the studio,” Slatkin says, quoting the song: “You got better bitches.”

“That’s really how we talk to each other,” he continues. “I don’t want to paint the picture that we were all just sitting there lighting candles in a dark room just crying. It was definitely not that. It was one of the more fun processes I’ve ever had making an album — just because it was just all of our friends, constantly just cracking jokes and making fun of each other. I think there are a lot of very special people in the world that just have It. And you can’t really quite put your finger on it. But whatever it is, you don’t want to leave their side. And Omar’s honestly just always had that.”

Apollo lives in Pasadena these days, which seems like a sleepy ZIP code for someone who regularly trades voice memos with Pedro Pascal (a good friend with a cameo on the album). “Where I live is beautiful,” Apollo says, “and I just feel away from everything. It reminds me of Indiana, I think, that’s probably why. Nostalgic reasons.”

“I don’t want to paint the picture that we were all just sitting there lighting candles in a dark room just crying.”

To be nostalgic for a place that played such a complicated part in your origin story is yet another of the gray areas where Apollo thrives. “I feel, like, four ways about one thing all the time,” he says. What he feels mostly these days is gratitude. Not the fake kind. “I’m in this state of repair,” he says of his past. He and his family are in a great place. (He brought his parents to Versailles while he was working on the album.)

“When I get a text from my mom or a phone call from my dad, or my sister reaches out, or I see my nephews’ expression when they’re playing sports. All of those things feel like yeses to me, they bring me joy. There’s an amazing piece of bread I just had, like, this is what life’s about. I’m very sensory. What I’ve come to realize is life is about quality. Quality in my work, quality in my relationships, harmonious friendships, quality food.” Even the latest album title is zen. When Apollo was complaining about his torturous love affair, a friend muttered simply: “God said no.”

There are other things to be grateful for, including a budding film career — he’s making his debut in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer next year alongside Daniel Craig — and a sprawling North American tour (following stops in Australia and Japan). Performing his past traumas every night has been, of all things, joyful.

“You’re surfacing all of these emotions that happened to you when you wrote them. And I remember how things smelled, how things feel, I remember all the senses that come up for me when I’m singing these songs. Even how the other person smelled. I don’t know, it’s strange. But it’s not triggering. It doesn’t make me sad. I’m giving a very small, compressed moment to the world.” Of his ex, he says: “I love that there was love that existed and that I got to experience it that deeply, and that it was even real and possible for me to feel.”

He pauses. “There is this beautiful thing that Tom Ford has said, ‘When I’m in my death bed, I don’t think I’ll be thinking about a nice pair of shoes I had or my beautiful house. I’m going to be thinking about an evening I spent with somebody.’”

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