Odeal didn’t always live in this velvet, R&B twilight. There was a time when his world moved faster (Pragma, Ovmbr: Roses), projects that rode like youthful combustion, all bright Afropop adrenaline tangled with alté’s restless urge to mutate. Those early records sprinted, flirted, shapeshifted, carrying the kind of reckless joy artists only manage before they start paying attention to their own shadows.
Then something in his sound elongated. Slowed. Darkened. He wandered into R&B’s moody corridors, and for a moment the shift felt like he had taken a wrong turn, too smooth, too slow, too intimate for the South London kid. But since last year’s Lustropolis, the full-length plunge into heartbreak’s fictional metropolis, Odeal has learned to breathe underwater.
The “Soh-Soh” singer now shapes entire worlds out of plush atmospheres, silky, low-lit songs that unfold like expensive fabric, the kind you only wear when you’re drinking wine you can’t pronounce.
Still, ‘The Fall That Saved Us‘, his third EP this year, carries a different yet familiar pulse. The softness is there, yes, but the edges are less polished. Every so often, he breaks the satin open and lets something feral slip through: a rawer tone, stranger textures, emotions that don’t bother dressing up before stepping into the room. It’s Odeal loosening the grip on his own aesthetic, letting the neat contours warp, letting the tenderness grow teeth.
By the time ‘The Fall That Saved Us‘ finishes unspooling its quiet catastrophes, you realize Odeal has done something peculiar: he’s staged a breakup album that keeps refusing to break. The record is littered with emotional shrapnel, lies tossed like confetti, small betrayals treated as punctuation marks, yet a stubborn flicker of hope keeps refusing eviction. It’s less “relationship autopsy” and more “two people lost in a maze believing the next turn might still lead home.”
Take “Pretty Girls.” It smolders like a VHS-era R&B postcard, but the romance is far from analog-smooth. Odeal cracks open the soft underbelly of a chaotic entanglement with a kind of brutal tenderness: “We went from sex in the morning to crashing out most days.” Later, the confession booth grows humid, admissions of manipulation, infidelity, and emotional evasions spill out unglamorously. Both lovers are flawed, maybe fatally, but beneath the wreckage lies a simple plea: pay attention to me. The refrain lands like a beggar’s crown jewel: “Act like you want me… you got what the pretty girls want.”
What makes this project glisten is its refusal to offer moral cliff notes. “Molotov”, the album’s secret detonator, shows Odeal trapped in a dance of mixed signals with a romantic interest who seems undecided, though his own emotional shutters are bolted tight. His self-awareness is almost painful: “Wanna love but I’m tired and exhausted…” It’s the kind of line that feels like someone sighing directly into the mic. Whatever city “Molotov” represents, its citizens are frostbitten long before winter arrives.
And then there’s the writing, sharp, elastic, mischievous. Odeal slips surprises into the smallest corners. The opening lines of “Wicked” gleam like a trapdoor: “They say there’s no rest for the wicked, but you slept on me… you the wickedest.” It’s equal parts humor, heartbreak, and high-wire wordplay. You blink, grin, and wince in the same breath.
Just when the emotional fatigue begins to set in, “Night in the Sun” breaks through like a warm front—helped by an unexpectedly luminous verse from Wizkid. The song glows in the exact hue of relief. Breakfasts shared without tension, a lover who finally feels like a resting place instead of a question mark. But Odeal never lets you fully relax. Even in this sunlit moment, you sense the tremor of impermanence. Joy appears—but with a soft disclaimer: handle with care; expiration date unknown.
By the end, Odeal’s nine track ‘The Fall That Saved Us‘ feels less like a collection of songs and more like a diary left open on a windy day—pages flapping, secrets exposed, hope refusing to shut up.
EP Score: 8/10
