Album Review: Clarity of Mind by Omah Lay
A Port Harcourt singer prays to Jesus and chases ikebe in the same bar. He doesn’t bother separating them.
Four years between albums is a long time in Afrobeats, and Stanley Omah Didia spent most of them watching his plans collapse. Boy Alone came out in 2022 as a record built on loneliness and substance-numbed nights, and it worked—topped the Nigerian albums chart, got a Justin Bieber feature, eventually helped produce a Grammy nomination off Davido’s “With You.” The follow-up was supposed to take a new direction. On the Zach Sang Show in 2024, Omah Lay explained that he’d shared an unreleased sound with a fellow artist he trusted, and that artist dropped an album five months later using the same idea. (Leaked DMs and producer Tempoe’s corroboration pointed fingers at Rema, though no one said the name on record.) He trashed the original sessions and started from nothing. Clarity of Mind, his sophomore album, is what survived that reset. Most of its tracks keep uttering the same thing. Nothing works anymore, but he keeps trying it all anyway.
The record starts with a substance talking back. Ìgbo—cannabis—is the raconteur on “Artificial Happiness,” telling him not to stop. “Before morning, the feeling will wash off/But tonight, we will die at the warfront,” he sings, the “Blood of Jesus” chanted in ad-libs while he describes a night fueled by weed and incomplete money. Three tracks later, “Don’t Love Me” runs an inventory of what’s gone numb:
“Hennessy no dey hit me again
Igbo no dey high me again.”
And then, flatly, why he spends money on women. He pays for a girl’s nails and her friends’ nails just to get in their pants. He pays two years’ rent on a five-bedroom rooftop apartment for another. The chorus is a warning repeated until it starts sounding like a fact. Don’t love me. On “I Am,” the math fits in consecutive lines. “Everybody know say smoking is dangerous/But, once I see marijua’, I go light am/Money is the root of evil but every day I pack am.” He knows, and knowing changes nothing.
“Wetin kill Samson? Na still ikebe o.” That’s the funniest line on Clarity of Mind, buried in “Waist,” a party track about a woman’s backside that stops mid-bounce to pray. “Jesu chai o, scatter my enemies, confuse them with little things,” he sings, then admits in the next breath, “I’m making wrong decisions/Anytime I see ikebe.” The Samson reference is the punchline, but the whole album runs on that same fuel. “Holy Ghost” calls the spirit his cocaine, his confidence booster, his mami water, then in the verse confesses that tequila is hitting his liver and every girl looks like wife material when he smokes indica. “Amen” asks God for peace of mind and enough money to buy anything he wants, in that order, while protecting his step in brand new Louis Vuitton. Religious language and hedonism keep showing up in the same sentence, and he never pretends to notice the gap.
Two tracks run thinner. “Water Spirit” is an extended sex scene dressed in spiritual language (she’s here to wash his sins away, but the song is really just the sex, down to “shut up your mouth and learn how to relax” and the tied hands and covered eyes). “Mary Go Round” says nothing is as sweet as kpetus and one person’s love of his life is another person’s hoe, but it doesn’t go anywhere with that. Both repeat what the sharper tracks already said, and say it with less wit.
He tells his Bisi not to wait for him on “Jah Jah Knows.” “As you see me, I no dey too sure/I don’t know what to do with my life.” Then he asks a question that’s smarter than it sounds—“Tell me who be policeman, if it wasn’t for the uniform.” Take the fame, the weed, the money away, and who is he? Only Jah Jah knows. Elmah’s presence on “Coping Mechanism” softens the record for a moment; she asks him to smile, she can see something wrong in his countenance, and his verse is the most unguarded on the album. “Unhappiness is hurting me/I can’t feel my shoulders anymore/Is it ‘cause I carry all the load?” He says he tours the world looking for where he might belong. It’s the one track where nobody’s telling anybody to shut up.
Tempoe produced or co-produced seven of these twelve tracks, and that gives Clarity of Mind a steady mid-tempo bed that suits Omah Lay’s half-sung, half-mumbled delivery. Only one guest shows up (Elmah, once), which keeps the focus on a single voice arguing with itself. “Julia” turns a table booked for twenty into a solitary night, hallelujah and hosanna ringing out while he’d rather be alone than with anyone else. That kind of moment—small, specific, quietly defeated—is where the album’s title makes sense. The clarity is just seeing yourself well enough to list everything that isn’t working and going back to it tomorrow.
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Don’t Love Me,” “Waist,” “Holy Ghost”