If OMAH LAY’s Boy Alone captured an artist in the midst of emotional dislocation, its follow-up, CLARITY OF MIND, finds him fresh off a deliberate recalibration, returning with a clearer sense of self. “I decided to chill for a minute, take care of myself, take care of my family, put my mind back in the right space,” he tells Apple Music’s Africa Now Radio. “It feels like I’ve just been inside doing all this healing, all this self-growth, and I looked at a bunch of records that I made during this time, and I’m like, yeah, this is clarity of mind.” The music he made during that withdrawal carries the texture of someone working inward rather than performing outward. “CANADA BREEZE” begins with jagged drums and the opening line lands immediately: “Fly from January to January/Still I never reach.” The journey is never-ending, and LAY has found a way to inhabit that endlessness rather than be defeated by it. He gets philosophical on “WAIST,” making the case in pidgin that what killed Samson was the waist—not violence and not betrayal in any grand sense, just nearness. CLARITY OF MIND is where the spiritual and the erotic share the same register. It runs from “WAIST,” where the “ikebe” is both physical lure and biblical undoing, through “HOLY GHOST,” where “my cocaina” and “my heart desire” sit in the same breath, to the mention of Mami Wata, where the lover is also a spirit. Devotion—whether to self, to God, or to a lover—moves without hierarchy. On “AMEN,” that shift resolves into something like collective affirmation: “I don’t listen to what they say/I trust my angels.” The album that begins with solitude turns a man’s innermost victories into something the world can celebrate.