Omar Apollo’s new album includes a tender, insightful voice message from Pedro Pascal

Just in time to carry us through the rest of the emotional rollercoaster of Cancer season, Omar Apollo has released his new album, God said no. Just like Apollo’s previous work, the record consists mostly of heart-wrenching bangers, including the penultimate track: “Pedro”, featuring none other than Pedro Pascal.

The song begins with Apollo’s voice filtered through a vocoder singing, “If Meadows were a man / Would you trade me for your land? / Mine still has a misty dew / Something I can offer you.” Then we hear the sweet tones of the star of The last of usaccompanied by minimal, bell-like keyboard sounds, as he tells – over what sounds like a voice message to Apollo – a story about a time in his life when he was “very shaken.”

In the recording, Pascal says that at the time of this heartbreak, he had just finished a job and was “too scared to go back to the US” because the second wave of COVID had reached Europe. He left Budapest for Switzerland to “buy some time and figure out what I was going to do before Christmas.”

“I had an incredibly good job, but something broke my heart,” says Pascal. He remembers walking in a residential area in the Swiss city of Lucerne and thinking about the saying. At that moment, the actor says, he was brought to his knees by something deceptively simple: a park bench.

“I remember begging the park bench to come alive and save me because I felt like there was nothing after that moment,” Pascal continues. “But there was. There was.” The song ends with Pascal saying, “I can’t believe I’m sending you this.” But thank goodness he did—assuming the recording is an actual audio message. Either way, Pascal’s story about his moment with the park bench feels like the perfect summation of the utter irrationality of heartbreak, and how, in its wake, we tend to look for meaning in the most unlikely of situations.

Just as the voicemail was a prominent feature of hip-hop for several decades, its more modern equivalent, the voicemail, seems to be making a big appearance in music right now. Besides Pascal’s voicemail to Apollo, there was of course the voicemail Charli XCX sent Lorde asking her to collaborate on the remix of “Girl, so confused,” which left the singer “speechless.” Celebrities: They’re just like us, exchanging intimate voicemails with their friends and feeling embarrassed about it.

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