Philippine-born Paolo Ombao's woozy, languid alt-R&B project Apollo Hill incorporated elements of rap and psych rock, hitting his stride in the late 2010s while he studied in Fullerton, Orange County, California. Born in 1995, Ombao made attempts at learning the violin and saxophone during his early years. However, those instruments didn’t make as big an impression on him as his first guitar, which he received age 11. Once his family moved to the U.S. it took a while for them to settle in one place. As a result, within the space of a decade Ombao had gained experience on the East and West Coasts, and the Midwest. By 2016 he was studying at Fullerton's California State University and became obsessed with trying to find the sweet spot between R&B and rock. Self-produced, early attempts at this -- "Dive," "Tearz," "Let's Fade Away Tonight" -- surfaced online under the Apollo Hill name around this time, and later in the form of collaborations with locally based acts such as Faradé and Phoenix Gld. His first tracks to reach a wide audience were 2018's minor-key ruminations "Red Wine" and "91 Willow St.," the latter hitting over 200,000 listeners even before it had been uploaded to multiple streaming services. By this point he'd performed at the local Programme Skate and Sound event, and as far away as Reno, Nevada but was putting most of his energies into online promotion. While he'd learned to cope with a serious stammer, close friends at the time commented that his rapping and singing masked this and it was clear that performance was a tool that filled Ombao with confidence. 2019 brought another contribution, this time to a Phoenix Gld project, when the track "Brownsugar" appeared on their DRK/BRNZ EP. In the first half of 2020 he ramped up the psych factor on a couple of singles for Roshambo Recordings: March's "Poison" and May's "When the Sun Don’t Shine." Both tracks appeared on the first widely distributed Apollo Hill EP, June's Vivid World Xprs, Pt. 1, by which time Ombao had relocated to L.A. ~ James Wilkinson