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WORDS KYLE RICE
PHOTOGRAPHY RICKY ALVAREZ
STYLING SEBASTIAN JEAN
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Summer of Sexy: This summer, Highsnobiety explores all the ways personal style transcends what we wear. This special series delves into critical discussions and stories that highlight the body as a site of expression and exploration – social, sexual, and psychological. Here we have a FRONTPAGE story with Omar Apollo – check back throughout the week for a photo essay on fashion’s greatest (ass)et, the butt; a consideration of underwear as pants, the history of “Lesbian Chic,” and a reported feature on the data that shows just how much the freedom to dress cannot be overstated.
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(FRONTPAGE 196): Omar Apollo is hard to miss. He towers over the Highsnobiety crew, gathered in New York’s Tribeca Synagogue for this shoot. Despite his stature, Apollo’s quiet, almost reserved. He comes across as gentle. Between looks, as everyone gathers in the building’s basement to prepare for the next setup, he flashes a smile. “Are we still grabbing sushi?” he wants to know, when it’s clear we’re reaching day’s end. We’re not there yet, but food is still on his mind as we sit together and I ask about his evening, and the shoot, and then shift to the most important topic: his latest album, God Said No.
He admits it’s not the easiest discussion, albeit a necessary one. “I’m still really in it,” he murmurs, referring to a former relationship that defined the album and left him in a bleak state.
It’s been over two years since the Mexican-American alt-r&b artist has graced fans with an album as substantial as God Said No. His debut, Ivory, with its myriad love ballads and pop hits, put him on the fast track to fame, especially when the single “Evergreen (You Didn’t Deserve Me At All)” unexpectedly went viral in 2021. “I had been promoting that [song] for four months,” he recounts, still in disbelief.
Compared to other hits that went viral that same year, like Olivia Rodigo’s “Good 4 U” and Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” “Evergreen” is slower, simpler, and more lyrically intimate. “Evergreen, he controls me/Was there something wrong with my body?/Am I not what you wanted, babe?” Apollo intros. Insteads of his peers’ energetic, up-tempo beats, Apollo found a niche in the melancholic feelings of love and loss. The sonically stripped track is grounding, composed simply of drum snares, subtle acoustics, and stacked vocals. Though “Evergreen” is representative of his writing approach so far, Apollo admits that not every song on the latest album is as introspective. “That’s me being on some ho shit,” he says with a snicker as we chat about one of the new tracks, “Against Me.” “People would get feelings, and I just wasn’t there, or I already kind of had feelings for someone else.”
To date, “Evergreen” remains his most popular song by all metrics. It garnered more than 150 million streams on Spotify in 2022 and granted him a spot at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Just a few months later, he was nominated for Best New Artist at the 65th Grammys, and while he didn’t win the category, the nod cemented his place as an artist to watch.
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