Cannabis, Carnality, & Christ: Inside Omah Lay’s Clarity of Mind"

“Man know thyself…”

If self-awareness is the height of personal truth, Omah Lay is the best of his graduating Socratic class. The pop star has always nursed a fascination with the workings of his mind, and how that impacts his creativity and life force. It’s a torturous exploration for him, echoing the hard life he lived as a child. Life gets real fast when you become your family’s bread winner in childhood, watch your friends die from oil bunkering, find escape and succor in music, before riding your skill to the height of your profession. Omah’s ascension through the hierarchy of the music industry changed his material status, but the demons in his head remain tough tenants. They come calling with each project, coloring his highs with melancholy, as he struggles to find respite from his depression. His entire discography so far has been multiple rounds of failed eviction notices for his tormentors. A literal dance with the devil.

Omah’s lamentations work well. He’s one of Nigeria’s most gifted artists, lots of No. 1 singles, a few global tours, and collaborative chart-toppers that thicken the tapestry of Afrobeats. Bad Influence, his incomprehensible titanic debut hit, opened the spigot from which flowed Soso, the de facto yearner selection on romantic playlists, where love is touted as both salvation and an existential balm for all the ills of the heart. And on Clarity of Mind, his second album following 2022’s successful Boy Alone, his moaning deepens, as he embraces spirituality, weed and acceptance on this exciting comeback.

This is where we find Omah Lay. Here he sings about being an obsessive beau, a cannabis enthusiast and God-lover, as well as his navigation of pain, and his place in the game as a songwriter and performer. He comes to this project bleeding from the start, albeit with the gained wisdom of a depressive veteran who has spent enough time with his pain to find clarity in coping. With the opening Artificial Happiness, he makes the defining declaration that “Igbo (marijuana) is telling on me,” a smoker’s hustling manifesto that invites singing with its meandering melodies, heavy kicks, and background chants of “Blood of Jesus!” It begins with a cinematic bass intro, guiding us backstage into a defiant picture of daily wake and bake sessions, and the winning inspiration it provides him. (”One in the morning time, that’s how I start my day. Advantage to start my day to see money clear,” which is something every stoner worth their puff will say).

The album’s first half continues to grapple with weed, God and sex, with Omah reflecting about his self-actualisation journey, his trysts with women, and how weed helps with pursuing money. On Jah Jah Knows he appreciates the struggle to win, and the uncertainty of everything working out. “Do you believe I’ve given it all of me,” he sings, an explanation that would be obvious to those who have followed his story. Canada Breeze is smack on the nose, reading out his compulsive desire to light up a jay. He breaks down his smoking routine over probing highlife guitar harmonics, and how it all helps him navigate his pain. “I no normal,” he repeatedly affirms his proclivities. All of it, the weed, the sex, the God-pleading, is the same thing wearing different clothes. Omah Lay is a man building a daily case for his own survival, and every song is another piece of evidence.

This type of directness is par for the course with Omah; his rawness and silliness have been defining pillars of his artistry, and it’s refreshing to hear him present this once again. “Girl get on your knees, come check in my jeans, wetin she see, she no believe…” is what you’d expect from Omah Lay’s writing, but he takes it a step further on Water Spirit by providing a blow by blow account of a blowjob. It’s this little familiarity that also appears on Mary Go Round, making sex an inside joke to his fandom, and his feverish dedication to getting laid saturates the mournful Don’t Love Me. Sex is both pleasure and absolution for him.

Coping Mechanism, a heart-to-heart between lovers featuring new signee Elmah, introduces love as a possible respite from pain, but Omah is too honest an artist to let it stick. The relief is temporary, the warmth conditional. In Julia, the loneliness returns with full force, eating him up despite being surrounded by people. “I’ll rather be alone, than with anyone else,” he sings, and then goes on his knees pleading, “my baby show, my baby show.” It is the sound of a man who has diagnosed his condition perfectly and cannot cure it anyway.

The final three tracks of Clarity of Mind are more tightly bound than anything else on the project, with Omah Lay in an uncharacteristically self-possessed mood across the Lekaa Beats-produced I Am, the hit single Holy Ghost, and the closer Amen. On I Am, the repetition is the argument, “I am who I am, I am who I am,” and the sparseness of the writing, the deliberate refusal to say more than is necessary, turns out to be where his greatness lives. The chest-thumping is liberating precisely because it costs him so little. Amen leans into Ikwerre highlife for its only verse, a groovy, prayerful request for the uncomplicated life, riding a 3-Step production with the looseness of a man who has already made his peace. “All I want for the rest of my life is some peace of mind,” he sings, “and enough money to purchase anything wey I wan buy.” It is the most honest thing on the album, which is saying something.

The first hints of Omah Lay’s spiritual reckoning were buried in the melancholy of Boy Alone, but nothing there suggested he would arrive at acceptance with this much ease, this much looseness in the shoulders. Clarity of Mind does not resolve his demons so much as negotiate livable terms with them, weed and God and sex serving as the unlikely trinity through which he finds his footing. He is still bleeding at the end of it. He is also, somehow, dancing. That combination, mournful and celebratory at once, has always been his gift. Here, for the first time, it feels like he knows it too.