Omah Lay: Afrobeats’ Brooding New Visionary
Omah Lay recoils hard when he sees the snow piling up outside of my window over Zoom. “I cannot deal with snow,” says the 26 year-old Nigerian star. “Bro, I can’t even deal with the weather in London.”
Lately, when he’s not in Lagos, he’s been spending a lot of time in Europe, where he has a fervent fan base that sings his distinct brand of emotional Afrobeats back to him at large shows. He’s been in London working on his new album since not long after his debut, Boy Alone, dropped in July 2022. That album grew popular over time, with Omah, born Stanley Omah Didiah, releasing a deluxe edition with six additional songs last summer.
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He beams when he talks about what’s next. “I’m in kind of a new place right now where I feel like I have grown so much in my stuff,” he says. “I feel like it’s still me, it’s still the same Omah Lay, but there’s just been a shift; an improvement. I also strongly believe that this year, the thing everybody’s familiar with as Afrobeats is going to change a lot, and I am going to be the front guy. I am going to be one of the leaders. And this sound, a lot of it is going to be on my album.”
His sound so far has been uncharacteristically dark and brooding for Afrobeats. Since breaking through in 2020 with “Bad Influence,” where he reflects on substance abuse and heartbreak with gut-wrenching groans, he’s continued to make music from this tortured space. His fans have even coined the term “Afro-depression” to describe it. His recent single “Holy Ghost” is a bit different — still severe, but empowered. It’s a pulsing prayer to his God; it’s worship on the dance floor. He says it’s a step in his new direction. “‘Holy Ghost’ is a symbol of my love for God,” says Omah Lay. “It’s a symbol of my respect for his creations, whether the ones people call good or bad.”
Omah Lay is sitting on a bunch of new music, he says, including an unreleased EP with versatile Latin star Ozuna. They made it when Omah spent a week hanging in Puerto Rico with the singer, who also appears on a remix of one of Omah’s biggest songs to date, “Soso.” But because Omah Lay’s spirit is so entrenched in his music, pursuing it as a career can be maddening, he explains. Songs like “Soso” are steeped in his own strife, with music videos that deepen that sense of turmoil by playing with mystic imagery. As a result, any criticism he receives can send him spiraling into self-doubt. Despite advice from friends and peers that he should try to distinguish between his personal and professional identities, it’s been difficult for him. “I feel like I am my music, but every book that I read, every speech that I listen to, [says] how you are not your thoughts, how you are not your mind, how you are not your work,” he says. “You are you, but I just haven’t been able to separate myself from the music. Maybe that is why my music is the way it is.”
Last February, Omah Lay earned the honor of performing an NPR Tiny Desk Concert, a popular platform for artists across generations and genres to put on a stripped-down set. His band sounded incredible, but Omah’s voice was shaky and flat; he both sang and spoke with visible uncertainty. “I hate that Tiny Desk performance,” he says. The corners of his lips curl into a smile before he throws his head into his hands. “I fucking hate that Tiny Desk. Oh God, they drove me to the ground for that Tiny Desk performance,” he adds, emphasizing it by driving his fist towards his lap. He’s not wrong – when I search “Omah Lay Tiny Desk” on YouTube, the second entry is a video with 29,000 views titled “Why Omah Lay’s tiny Desk Performance was ‘NOT GOOD.’” However, I’ve since seen videos of his live shows, like a concert in Lagos this past December, where he plays with passionate new ad-libs as he performs his early single “You,” his energy matching the audience that’s enthusiastically belting back to him.
“You need to be at my new shows,” he says, saying he’s finally learned how to channel the raw emotion of his music into a set, from his own vocal effort to the visuals around him. In his first performance of “Holy Ghost” in Paris, before the single dropped, a vivid pink moon swirled behind him as dancers clad in white robes and black face paint convulsed on and around him. He managed to lead the crowd in a vibrant singalong of a song they only came to know moments before.
“I feel like I have grown to that point where I’m beginning to love live shows a lot more now,” he tells me. “It didn’t used to be like that. I just did it because the team is like, ‘Omah Lay, we have to go on tour and shit.’” He says learning to love himself more has also given him a new appreciation for his fans and that he’s working to build the show they all deserve. We talk about mental health, and agree that as our own has gotten stronger, we’ve become more attuned to others.
As he’s become less burdened by his own suffering, Omah Lay says he’s learned to enjoy his own talents more — doing things like picking up the guitar for no reason at all, watching himself sing in the mirror, and rehearsing on a whim. “I didn’t used to be able to watch my performance,” he says. “I hated myself for the longest time. I hated myself so much. And I think up ’till today, I still hate myself, but everybody has moments where they hate themselves, too. Right now it’s just OK. I have accepted who I am.”
He says dropping Boy Alone marked a turning point. “That was when I took serious control, because the reviews from the album really almost drove me crazy the first week,” he tells me. Ahead of its release, he went to Los Angeles and spent two weeks alone in a massive house, where he got some rough feedback. “Fans were cursing me out, they’re like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Like, bro, either you just change, become the man, face this shit, or you let it break you. So I chose to help myself.”
Reading books like Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being and diligently studying his own feelings and triggers have helped him, though he says he’s still not totally out of the dark place that Boy Alone captured. “I just think that I have mastered it so much that I now know how to step out when I want to and go back in when I want to,” he says. “I have a bit of control. I feel like I can use it — because honestly, there’s not so much creativity that’s in light. Light is just bright and beautiful. If you can find your way around darkness, then, of course, you’ll fly when it’s light.”
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