Issavybe’s Only You Finds the Soul in Silence and Survival

 
By Emmanuel Daraloye
 
Grief rarely arrives as a clean narrative. It comes in fragments, in breaths that feel too heavy, in questions with no answers. On Only You, released August 16, 2025, Issavybe takes those fragments and turns them into music that refuses to flinch. What results is a soul track that feels less like performance and more like testimony.
 
Born Ndulagwa Emmanuel, the Nigerian singer-songwriter has been honing his craft since 2016. Performing under the name Issavybe, he brings to his work the influence of storytellers who shaped him: Eminem’s raw confessions, Sia’s unguarded intensity, and Michael Bolton’s sweeping emotional delivery. These touchstones inform his music, but his voice is distinctly his own: direct, vulnerable, and unwilling to look away from pain.
 
Only You begins in near silence. A single piano chord, patient and steady, holds the air. A faint female voice enters, repeating the phrase Only You like a mantra, so quiet it sounds borrowed from a dream. For half a minute the listener is suspended in this fragile stillness. Then Issavybe’s voice cuts through, heavy with exhaustion and clarity. Feels like I’ve been cursed, and you can seeeeeeee. Feels like I’m lifeless, I cannot breathe. In those opening lines, the ground shifts. We are no longer in the world of casual listening; we are inside someone’s grief.
 
The song unfolds in a way that is shaped as much by its hesitations as its notes. Issavybe leans into spaces where most singers might smooth things over. His rhythm falters and shifts, echoing the way pain unsettles everything it touches. The effect is deeply human. The centrepiece arrives with a plea that is stretched until it becomes unbearable: How do I leave my skinnnnnnnn. It is not just sung, it is endured, a line that vibrates with desperation and lingers long after it’s gone.
 
As the track moves toward its close, the arrangement swells. The piano gives way to layered keyboard effects that mimic strings and a faint choir, creating a space that feels almost ceremonial. The sound grows wider, fuller, but never lighter. Instead, it deepens the sense of gravity, as though grief itself has become a cathedral. The final lines, I guess this life right here, this will be who I am, settle into the music with devastating calm. It is not resolution, not triumph, but a hard-won acceptance.
 
Only You stands apart in its refusal to sanitize heartbreak. There is no gloss here, no concession to streaming-era formulas. Every pause, every repetition, every crack in the vocal is part of the song’s language. Issavybe understands that emotional truth carries more power than perfection. By allowing the pain to remain jagged, he gives the track its weight.
 
Only You is not background music. It is the kind of song that demands stillness, that asks the listener to sit with it, to feel the heaviness it carries. In doing so, Issavybe has created something rare: a song that documents grief without disguise and transforms survival into art.