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Heartbreak, like grief, is unflinching in its tyranny because it forces you to feel the full weight of an absence. Someone who had been a constant fixture in your life, with whom you shared countless moments—good and bad ones, exhilarating and austere ones—someone whose presence swaddled you like a blanket on a baby, is suddenly lost to the void, estranged from you. One moment your futures feel inextricably linked, and the next you’re strangers forced by fate into diverging paths. Heartbreak is cruel!
The process of moving on from a heartbreak is similarly cruel and complicated. It’s less a sequenced progression—as is typically depicted in the media—than a convoluted whorl that can often leave you adrift. You could spend months healing and working on yourself (as self-help gurus typically advise), only to happen upon a picture of your ex on social media which unravels your months of hard work. A deluge of old memories floods your brain and soon you’re back writhing in pain and wondering if, at the cost of your dignity, you should maybe text them one last time and see where things might lead.
Much of the pleasure of Obongjayar’s Paradise Now derives from its frankness—how it provides a panoramic view of the messy process of getting over a heartbreak. In the album’s opener, It’s Time, a propulsive Alt-Pop song that mostly finds him in an airy falsetto, he paints a visceral picture of heartbreak. Over a beat that is in turns placid and riotous, he describes the depth of his pain with lyrics that could easily serve as a prose poem: “I walk around with my head on a swivel/ It’s hard trusting in anything.” He then proceeds to chastise himself for his self-victimization, “No more wearing my head down/ Hurting myself more than you hurt me.” Somewhat expectedly, by the time we reach the chorus, he’s belting in a mesmerizing head voice about his intent to move on. “I think it’s time I pick up the pieces,” he declares.
Despite his soaring message in It’s Time, by the second track he’s back in old patterns, reminiscing about his ex with lyrics that are at once haunted and macabre. “Why did you leave me? You weren’t here/ Blood on my teeth, sand in my hair/ I’m on my way home, but I don’t want to be staring down the barrel of a gun.” It’s graphic, and dangerously visceral, but this verse aptly describes the mind-numbing torture that heartbreak often brings about. By the second verse, he mulls the dichotomy between his outward appearance of normalcy and his embattled internal state. “How to tell them I don’t feel amazing/ How to tell them I’m still fucked up/ Drink myself silly, hope they can’t see me?” He asks.
Anyone who has trudged through the doldrums of a messy breakup will probably relate to this all too well. After a breakup, one is typically faced with a halo of pressure—both from oneself and from loved ones—to move on, to pick up the pieces. You can’t possibly spend the rest of your life wallowing in self-pity, they often say. But the heart is an obstinate mule, it moves at its pace, on its terms. And so what often happens is that to satisfy external pressures, on the world one pretends to have moved on whilst continuing to battle old demons internally.
The intervening tracks mostly find him negotiating the often glossed-over complexities of moving on. But by Instant Animal something radical happens. He seemingly transforms from a wounded animal to a possessed shaman. By way of guttural trills and curt chants, he declares his ascendancy. By Born In This Body, which is two tracks removed from the final track, he attains catharsis. We are suddenly transported to a world of overwhelming tranquility as he delivers a treatise on body positivity and self-acceptance.
By the final track, Happy Head, it’s obvious that he has made peace with his demons, and that having traipsed through the seven stages of grief, he’s finally on his path to recovery. “Slow down,” he sings, apparently to himself and the rest of us, “You’re burning out/ You’re truly your mother’s child/ Can’t be everything at every time.” After a kaleidoscopic album that often tested the limits between pain and pleasure, he closes the album with a simple charge: Make yourself happy.
