With Fola’s Debut Album “Catharsis”, He Promises Emotional Release

“I actually wasn’t planning to do music before. I always liked to play football.” Fola looks luminous, excitedly rocking his right leg and making elaborate gesticulations as he recalls this memory. In this episode of With an S’ podcast, released shortly before his debut EP, he shares the story of his journey to becoming one of Afrobeats’ most prolific artists. To impress girls in his high school, he started making music. His enthusiasm for football would soon give way to an implacable desire to make it as a music star. Much later a girl in his school would introduce him to the CEO of his first label Bankz Nation Entertainment—she was his brother. In a sense, it can be argued that these events prefigured the kind of music he makes today, which mostly revolves around women. He’s either serenading them or pulling apart a thorny romantic situation. There are rarely in-betweens and he’s at the height of his powers when he’s sifting through the ashes of a failed relationship.

Fola’s music exists in the liminal space between pleasure and pain, that mid-space  in which emotions blur and muddle and give way to something visceral, a feeling so intense that all you can do is let down your inhibitions and bask in the medley of poignant feelings his music heralds. In Alone, which shot him to stardom last year,  he conjures a vivid scene of romance in a picturesque town. He’s wholly smitten with his lover. We know this through his lyrics which are yearning and through the tangible wistfulness in his voice. His lover, however, despite his devotion, is cold and distant. She is, by his admission, cheating on him. But that does very little to dampen his affection for her. It’s almost like he’s trapped in a delusion. “I know you’re missing me,” he sings to his clearly cold, distant lover. 

Right here is the magic of his music; how he delights in summoning beauty from his pain. In Katie Roiphe’s The Violet Hour, she writes: “It’s also the artist’s impulse: to turn something terrible into art, to take something you are terrified of and heartbroken by and make it into something else.” By this token, Fola is the quintessential artist, a wily troubadour whose honest probing of pain and pleasure, of how these two forces thread through the human experience, has made him one of the most exciting artists out of Africa today. In the past few months, he has increasingly dominated charts across the continent. His music, we can argue, has become a salve to the whole of Africa.

On Catharsis, Fola’s much-anticipated debut album, he occasionally takes detours exploring themes such as the surrealness of his superstardom but for the majority of the 11 tracks on the project, he trains his focus on a familiar theme: romance. Perhaps the biggest bane of music critics and enthusiasts in this part of the world comes from the reality that album titles rarely ever correlate with the theme of albums. Just as Victony’s Stubborn, while fleetingly touching on intransigence, is mostly populated with cherry pop songs and ballads; Wizkid’s Morayo is hardly about his mother or the grief he faced after she passed. As such it would be tricky to use the title of Fola’s album as a lens for understanding its contents. And yet, it’s hard not to read Catharsis as an indication of Fola’s intent to move past the fraught narratives that reverberate through the songs that shot him to stardom into more serene terrain. 

Indeed the larger part of the album finds Fola relatively sprightly, unencumbered with the fraught themes he typically explores. In You, over a groovy beat by Kel-P, he rhapsodizes about his affection for his lover. In Healer he’s a bit more somber. The production here mirrors his reflective tone conjuring the moody atmosphere of a rainy day. But the subject here is still love and whatever poignance we hear in his voice is a result of being overcome with affection. “Go tell everybody/ You’re my healer,” he sings in the chorus. The lines are simple, deceptively so, as you’d be mistaken to take their simplicity for inertness. Listening to him trot out these lines over the soaring melodies of the production, we suddenly feel as though we’re watching a quaint romcom: the protagonists live out a romance that can only be described as fantastical, we know it’s unrealistic and yet the allure of this trope is so powerful that it disappears our sense of reality, allowing us to vicariously experience the lustre of a life free from the straits of pragmatism. 

The strongest moments on the project however come when Fola sinks to that fraught register in which he pulls apart thorny romance. Need I say that Lost, featuring Kizz Daniel, in which he conjures a vivid montage of a lover who’s only with him for his money, is one of the best songs on the album? The song thrums with palpable tension. Even though his lover denies being with him solely for his wealth, he intuitively knows she’s only saying what he wants to hear. The obverse to this dynamic is equally interesting: while he professes love to her, it’s only a ruse, worst of all one he appears to have convinced himself into believing. In reality, what he craves is the warmth of her body. 

Robbery, which features Gabzy, is equally one of the most beautiful songs on the project. With its supple stripped-down production and airy vocals, the song feels more like a Gabzy song. But Fola holds his own on the track. Here the subject is an emotionally unavailable lover, one who’s stubborn and selfish, as Gabzy tells us in his verse. “Running away, running away with my time/ Running on time, running on time we can’t buy/ If we make a plan, then trying’s the least we can do/ But you only think about you/ Feels like a robbery,” he sings on the chorus. Songs like Caricature and Cruise Control thrum with a similar tension. The songs are consequently incredibly moving. 

The cracks in the project become apparent when we depart from this emotionally fraught territory. We begin to see that since we were introduced to him last year with Alone he’s still deploying the same melodies and flows. There’s barely any attempt at sonic innovation, and as such it only takes a few listens before the album starts to get monotonous. In the moments when he’s not plumbing emotional distress or complicated situations, he loses his winsome songwriting flair. Instead, we’re treated to repetitive lyrics, songs that feel like demos, and metaphors that are so painful to listen to. When in Eko he sings “I’ve been making money pass my coworker/ pulling heavyweight like Mayweather,” it’s hard not to roll your eyes. Is that really the best he could come up with? To sum it up: when he’s not untangling complicated romance he’s at a loss for what to say; vapid repetitive lyrics and disconcerting metaphors take the place of the vivid storytelling we know him for. All of this makes one wonder if catharsis is what he should have aimed for with this album.