Album Review: BOY by Sondae

A Brighton-based British artist examines what it means to grow up without lying about the cost, channeling R&B, worship, and patois into songs that argue about obedience, appetite, and repair.

Courtesy of Wings Music Group.

Sondae’s father lost his own father at fifteen and had to become the man of the house overnight, running the family business, keeping seven siblings in school before he could return himself. That pressure got passed down as a style of parenting: hyper-independent, hyper-decisive. The lesson Sondae took from watching his father learn to lean on God later in life is the title’s central tension. To enter heaven, you remain a boy at heart. The album keeps circling that question so much as holding it open across these songs, returning to the same friction from different angles. The desire to be grown, the suspicion that wanting to be grown is its own kind of vanity.

“So ya think ya a big man now,” says a voice at the top of “Shadow,” laughter still in its throat. The tone lands somewhere between affection and warning, the kind of thing an elder says when a younger man starts acting like he’s figured something out. That laughter sets the stakes for BOY: Sondae spends the album trying to answer a question he knows he can’t finish answering, and the patois that frames the opener isn’t decorative. It’s the sound of inherited discipline, church talk, and island cadence braided together, delivered like coaching from someone who remembers what happens when boys forget they’re still learning. “I know how you’re always faithful/I just struggle with the why” comes a few lines later, and that admission is the album’s engine. Faith here is not a conclusion. It’s a problem he keeps working on in real time.

“Tonight” lays out the world’s menu plainly. “Money, sex, power… All this vanity,” Sondae lists, the line almost bored with how obvious the temptations are. But the song doesn’t end there. It pivots into admission: “I’m not perfect God/But ‘cause of your perfect light/You don’t escape my eyes.” The construction is strange and interesting. He’s not claiming transformation; he’s claiming that he can still see. The feature from Ochaé, a Maryland-based Christian R&B singer, doesn’t soften the song so much as widen its address, turning private confession into something more like collective testimony. The two voices don’t harmonize into resolution. They share the same uncertainty.

“Yours” works the same ground with more agitation. “Lord speak to me/I will listen this time” opens as a promise, but the word “this time” does all the work. It admits that listening hasn’t always happened. Later: “So many things try to pull me away/But how could I stray?/I’ve seen too much of your love.” The logic is circular, almost defensive. He’s arguing himself into staying, naming the pull before he can be accused of ignoring it. “But my pride/I fight to remove everyday” is the more honest line, and he follows it quickly with a concession that the fight isn’t flesh and blood. The Spirit reminds him. He can not get carried away. The doubling of “can not” instead of “can’t” slows the sentence down, makes the refusal feel like effort rather than instinct.

“Bring All Your Scars” and “Don’t Give Up on Me” function as two kinds of pleading, separated by several tracks but tethered by the same fear. The first is addressed from God’s perspective, a voice calling the speaker back to earlier fire: “I know you just want the fire again.” The second flips the address. “I know that you won’t be mad at me forever/Get those lies out of my head.” The timestamps in that song are specific. Six-thirty and I’m feeling it. Eight-forty I been dreaming it. Last night I couldn’t sleep. These aren’t metaphors for spiritual distance. They’re the hours of someone grinding through insomnia, bargaining with exhaustion, hoping that mercy doesn’t run out before morning.

“Sanctify Me Lord, Again” distills the album’s posture into its most direct form. “’Cause I’m tired, I can’t pretend.” That’s not triumphant testimony. It’s fatigue announcing itself, the prayer of someone who has already been sanctified once and needs it again because the first time didn’t stick permanently. Holiness here is not a state you enter and hold. It’s something you ask for repeatedly, embarrassed each time by the need to ask. “Flowers” arrives near the end with proposal language. “Will you marry, Girl, will you marry me?/Will you carry/Carry on our babies.” After all the spiritual bargaining, the domesticity feels almost startling. “I got you flowers/‘Cause you like the way they smell.” The scale shrinks. The stakes become ordinary. He’s nervous about vows. He wants to hold hands while walking out of the church. Against the grand declarations that fill the rest of the album, this is commitment talk in a minor key, love as daily practice.

Leon Dramis appears on “Living On,” another Brighton artist, and the collaboration keeps the album’s geography local. The song’s central admission is almost severe: “Lord, I’m kneeling at the altar with fists balled up/And in anger crying ‘do You even see?’” The fists don’t open. The verse acknowledges that this journey has never been about him, but that acknowledgment doesn’t make the anger disappear. Crystal Mills joins “Something New,” which catalogs what the speaker needs: patience, faith, lessons, confession, and intercession. The list is long and practical, and the song doesn’t pretend that any of it comes naturally.

Solid (★★★½☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Yours,” “Tonight,” “Don’t Give Up on Me”