It’s the steamy end of a New York summer, when just a stroll outside is a doggy paddle through humidity, but the tall, lean Omar Apollo is fresh as a long-stemmed daisy. The 24-year-old singer born Omar Apolonio Velasco has salt-and-pepper hair that’s parted neatly down the middle, a recently shaved face, and an outfit shiny and impeccable from the chunky Prada boots up, with fingernails painted pearly-white and a gleaming diamond tennis bracelet. At 6’5”, he’s a towering if gangly figure, a bit like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, slouching his shoulders in a tiny East Village coffee shop as though he’s a teenager who just had a growth spurt but is unsure of what to do with the inches. He has a guarded quality to him, which is equal parts steely and sweetly shy. He’s working on a new album – his major label debut, no less – at a studio down the street, but he’s taken a break for a chorizo taco and an iced matcha latte, which he throws away after suspecting it of containing cow’s milk even though he ordered plant-based.
It is a career-defining moment in the life of Omar Apollo and he’s trying to get everything he can right – over the last five years, he’s surfed a wave of indie heartthrob adoration into a healthy level of niche fame, selling out medium-sized venues from here to California and methodically building a loyal fanbase for his wide-eyed romantic R&B songs, mostly uploaded himself to the internet. But now, with his first full album on deck after signing to Warner Records last year, it can feel like the whole world is watching to see how he’ll do.
Though he’s been best known for a more lo-fi sound, for this project, he’s at his poppiest, danciest yet. A sense of ambition extends everywhere: For a recent performance of teaser single Go Away on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, he performed on multiple background sets to glide through – singing on a park bench, in an aeroplane, in the clouds – that had the effect of a diorama designed by Wes Anderson. Even on a lunchtime break, he’s fielding phone calls from sound engineers to discuss reverb levels and drums, and he tells me that though he had already assembled several songs over the summer that he thought were going to make up the album, he’s hastily switched direction recently and is recording all new ones. “I thought I was done,” he says. “But then I was like, Oh no. I’m not.”
He clearly has a perfectionist bent, obvious in everything from his work ethic to his wardrobe; today he is a dandy in a crisp purple short sleeve shirt and pressed black Dickies trousers. After the taco, we saunter through the East Village and its heat, making a quick stop at a vintage store. Apollo distractedly wanders through the racks of clothes, but nothing catches his eye, and so we amble outside to catch some shade on a bench in the leafy labyrinthine Tompkins Square Park. He tells me repeatedly that he’s unbothered by the burden of delivering a successful album. “I want everyone to listen, but I can't control that. I definitely feel a pressure but no one’s forcing me,” he says. “Succeeding is so subjective. Just putting out a song I like – putting out Bad Life – feels like success.”
The melancholy guitar ballad Bad Life, which features popular Colombian-American R&B artist Kali Uchis, is one of two tracks, along with Go Away, that have been released to the public from the album. Both are bittersweet serenades told from the perspective of a boy who can’t keep the love of his life by his side. They are Apollo at his best, which is also, interestingly, him at his most bereft – sensitive, sad, slightly sour – a jilted narrator who gave his anguished heart to the wrong person. In each, he pines for the touch of his love’s skin, then tries to play it cool to hide hopelessness underneath, expressing a vulnerability and rawness that feels almost naive in nature. “He’s baby – he’s still so baby,” says Uchis, using Gen Z slang to mean innocent or uncorrupted. “I see him as a sweetheart. I’m only a couple years older than him but I feel a need to protect him from the world. He’s just that young soul.”
Any person who has ever been naive and dumb in love – and who hasn’t? – will hear something special in Apollo’s heartbreak anthems, and while Go Away has a quick tempo and something of a pop sheen, with Bad Life gauzier and more acoustic, both showcase Apollo’s ability to innately connect with something intimate – a feeling, a memory, a warmth – no matter the outward presentation. “I just really care,” he says. “I feel like you gotta really care about a song, really give a fuck about what you're doing – that's all. It’s like, Is your soul in it?”
Apollo grew up in the industrial city of Hobart, a town of around 30,000 in rust belt Indiana. “You work at the steel mill, and that's it,” Apollo says of Hobart’s socioeconomic situation when he was younger. “We definitely didn't have any money growing up.” When he was a kid, his parents, both immigrants from Mexico, each had jobs at his elementary school. His father delivered the food every morning that would end up in the kids’ lunches, and his mother, the lunch lady, doled out the finished meals and snuck Omar special plates when she could. Whereas some kids would be embarrassed to see their mum and dad at their school, his parents both worked tireless 16-hour days, so Apollo was just happy he got the time with them. “I would go up and hug them,” he recalls. “I didn't give a fuck. No one said shit because, like, my friends, their parents were like lunch ladies too.”
Apollo’s knack for conveying deep affection through his pen is somewhat hereditary. He tells me with pride the incredibly romantic tale of how his parents met, a real-life version of the great love stories you hear about in legend: His father had already made the trek to Indiana from Mexico to find work, but heard about a girl back home – a friend of his sister’s – who sounded sweet. The two began exchanging letters as pen pals, getting to know each other separated by thousands of miles through the written word. “My mum sent a picture of her to my dad,” he says, “and my dad still has the picture.” When his father realised she was the one, he went back to Mexico and helped her get across the border so that they could be married and raise a family.
Small-town life made Apollo a bit of a dreamer, and he grew up hearing the epic moonstruck Spanish-language ballads his parents loved, picking up a sense of melodrama that infuses songs like Bad Life and Go Away to this day with what he calls a “longing”. “The stuff my mum and dad would play me, they’re all romantic like, I need you, I want you, I miss you, I love you. That translated to what music was for me,” he says. “[Mexican crooner] Pedro Infante has a song called Cien Años, which means ‘100 Years’. He sings, if I live 100 years, in 100 years I'll think about you. It’s like, is he really thinking about her for 100 years? But that just got sealed in me.”
At around 12 years old Apollo put a guitar on his Christmas list. His parents bought him an electronic one, but he didn’t have an amp to connect to, so they went to a pawn shop and traded it for an acoustic. He taught himself how to play from YouTube tutorials. He started casually writing and recording his own songs, uploading them online almost as a joke. “I would make really stupid cover art – I had one of Adam Sandler from Happy Gilmore,” he laughs. “I would put in the captions to the songs on SoundCloud, ‘I might delete this, sorry the bassline sucks’ or some shit like that. But people actually really liked it.”
In between hours working at the drive-thru window at McDonalds, he began gigging at open mic nights in nearby Chicago, taking the hour-long train into the big city and trying out versions of a live show persona. “I had a microphone and a laptop and a few songs that I made off of YouTube beats,” he says. “The first time, I was thinking about what I was going to do, and I was like, I’ll just dance. I was popping and locking and shit.” He was also beginning to develop what is now his signature sense of wacky on-stage style. He loves anything outrageous – sequins, glitter, patent leather – an inclination he’s had since shopping in the girls’ section of Indiana thrift stores. “He’s not afraid to wear stuff that other people would be afraid to wear,” says friend Uchis. He routinely dyes his hair a kaleidoscope of shades, from Gatorade blue to neon green to ombre purple, a habit he picked up hanging around a barbershop where his mum sometimes worked. “She would test shit on my hair,” he remembers. “She’d dye my hair every time I asked.”
All along the way, Apollo kept releasing tracks, and his audience modestly grew, eventually netting him a few thousand followers on SoundCloud. He was learning to stay as close to his creative instincts as possible. A 2016 song, Yellow Jasper, which he now thinks of as an artistic breakthrough, was quickly improvised on the way to his job at a sandwich shop. “I was about to be late so I had to leave and I had this beat. I started to freestyle in my car, recording it with a voice memo,” he says. “Later, I was listening to it like, ‘Oh shit, there's a structure’. I went and [properly] recorded it afterwards but kept it exactly the same.” Not too long after, he borrowed $30 from a friend to pay the entrance fee to get on Spotify and uploaded a mid-tempo funk ballad called Ugotme – the song was quickly playlisted by Spotify and by the next day, had tens of thousands of listens.
Though massive mainstream fame has yet to fully follow, Apollo already has something incredibly valuable – something even the most famous people don’t necessarily possess – as a foundation: tried and true fan devotion. He might not have as many followers as, say, Ed Sheeran, but go to any sold-out show of his and you’ll see those he does have are committed; a recent behind-the-scenes video from his first concerts back post-COVID, uploaded to his personal YouTube channel, finds fans waiting in line all day to get into his show and screaming along with every word he sings once inside.
He thinks some of this love is because he’s a Mexican-American artist who has made it in a world that still has far too many barriers up for people like him. “Latino kids,” he says, “will tell me that they feel represented.” He’s proud of his roots: he sings in both Spanish and English throughout his music, and has even released his own hot sauce, Disha Hot, in homage to his mum’s Mexican food. Uchis, raised in Colombia, says his background is part of what makes him a figure to root for. “I love seeing my people do something outside of the box,” she says. “We’re all family. When you see a Latino artist succeed doing what he loves, you want to see him go as far as he can possibly go, to do whatever he has to do to be happy.”
Apollo symbolises something new for another big reason: increasingly, he’s been bringing queer love to the fore in his songs and music videos, still a rarity in popular music. The video for new song Go Away features another man as his love interest and on last year’s Apolonio EP, many of the songs were sung about men, including one cheekily titled Bi Fren. He’s casual about it all: he doesn’t think of any of it as a statement about his sexuality – it’s just, simply, the truth. “He had a girlfriend, and I was the third wheel and that was kind of the whole thing,” he says of the guy who inspired Bi Fren. He’s uninterested in spelling out publicly how he identifies but says if he “had to put a name to it,” queer “feels right.” “People know when you're listening to me, you’re listening to some queer music,” he says. “I know exactly who I am.”
But if he was forced to really trace the source of his appeal, Apollo believes his fans are connecting to something deeper, beyond words or external appearances, in the music: a vulnerability, an honesty, an aura. “You can tell when somebody’s being authentic, if they really give a fuck about what they’re doing,” he says. “That’s what really cuts. You can’t see me when you listen to my music – you have to hear it.” Fashion sense, heritage, whatever – to Apollo, it all pales in comparison to the power of what’s embedded right there in the sound. “I don’t,” he says of why it’s the songs that matter most of all, “see any other reason to like somebody.”
Even with all his confidence, there are some signs of jumpiness beneath Apollo’s outward nonchalance – when I ask about gossipy online speculation on his dating life towards the end of our mostly amiable conversation, Apollo shoots me a disdainful look, and the conversation turns a little acrid. By the conclusion of our chat he’s so eager to get away from me that he leaps up off our bench and sprints into the park’s wild greenery almost before I have a chance to say goodbye, leaving a proverbial cartoon cloud of dust in his wake.
It’s perhaps just starting to dawn on the 24-year-old that there are adult stresses on the horizon. “I've definitely had dreams of me working at McDonalds again,” he had told me earlier of what could happen if the music career doesn’t work out. “Putting out things you care about – that’s scary as fuck. You gotta do it, you know? You’ve gotta keep the lights on.” Ahead of the new album’s release, slated for early next year, he’s doing his best to shut out all the noise. “I used to work with 20 people in the room every time I’d be in the studio,” he says. “Now I kick everyone out so it’s just me.”
So far, the focus is working. One trappy cut is captivatingly confident and catchy, and he’s never bared his soul as clearly as he does on some of these newer tracks, including a pretty pastoral ballad that details a romantic trip on psychedelic mushrooms, the song conjuring an image of arcadian strawberry fields filled with young love.
That’s the thing with possessing a potent inner child – it’s not always so great for handling business, but it is good for fostering creativity and allowing an artist to tap into a wellspring of feeling, as Apollo so plainly does. For now, he’s trying to hold on to the quiet before the storm for as long as he can, the blessed moment when an artist on the verge of something huge can keep dreaming big and follow all his impulses, re-recording an entire album from scratch on a whim and belting tender tunes that hit as close to the heart as humanly possible. “It’s so weird,” he said earlier, assuredly. “I can do whatever I want.”
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