Go Away

The emotional contradiction at the heart of this song is its most honest quality: the desire for someone to disappear expressed through music so warm and inviting they'd have no reason to leave. The production has a vintage funk-soul undertow — rubbery bass, guitar licks that snap and slide, a rhythm section that keeps things buoyant even when the lyrics are doing something more complicated. It's the kind of track that makes your shoulders move before your brain has processed what it's actually saying. Apollo's voice here sits lower in his register, more chest than head, which gives the delivery a physicality and directness that his airier ballads don't always have. He performs frustration the way someone does when they're still too close to a situation to have perspective on it — there's heat but also helplessness, irritation cut through with something that sounds unmistakably like affection. The lyrical core circles around the exhausted plea of someone who knows a relationship has stopped working but whose body hasn't received the memo. This sits comfortably in the neo-soul-adjacent independent R&B scene that flourished in the late 2010s and early 2020s, drawing from classic influences while sounding distinctly contemporary. Best heard on a Sunday afternoon when you're cleaning your apartment and pretending you're not thinking about someone specific, because you definitely are.