After All Review: GiddyGang & Vuyo Turn Grief Into a Flex (Honestly)

After All isn’t a “vibey” rap-soul record—it’s Vuyo airing out survival, ego, and romance over GiddyGang’s jazz-warm restraint.

A Record That Walks In Mid-Conversation

Some albums introduce themselves. After All shows up already arguing with its own reflection—then asks you to sit there while it does it.

And yeah, it’s only about thirty-six minutes, but it doesn’t spend even ten seconds pretending it’s here to make small talk.

The Backstory You Can Hear in the Breathing

Before the songs even get heavy, the context is already doing push-ups in the corner. Vuyo’s life doesn’t read like an artist bio; it sounds like the reason his verses refuse to romanticize anything. Born in a Zimbabwean hospital to a father tied to the anti-apartheid movement and a mother who fought for Namibian liberation, then chased by death threats into Oslo as a teenager—he ends up with the kind of personal history that makes most “real rap” look like cosplay.

That restlessness is baked into how he delivers lines: like he’s always halfway between countries, between versions of himself. You can hear the record-collection education too—Fela Kuti and Hugh Masekela aren’t name-dropped as aesthetic seasoning; the phrasing and the groove choices feel like they learned discipline from those records.

And then there’s the machine he plugs into: GiddyGang, a six-piece Oslo collective orbiting Sarah Vestrheim and Sigmund Vestrheim, with Bård Kristian Kylland on keys, Kevin Andersen on guitar, Martin Stapnes on bass, and Sigurd Drågen on trombone. The group already linked up with Vuyo on Destiny/Sacrifice in 2024, and the reaction opened doors—favorable local buzz and public nods from Robert Glasper and DJ Jazzy Jeff.

But After All doesn’t sound like a victory lap. It sounds like a person using momentum as a place to hide.

Grief Without the Spotlight: “Running Away” and “Superhero”

Here’s the first thing I didn’t expect: the album’s biggest loss is treated like a fact of weather, not a dramatic monologue.

Vuyo’s sister, South African visual artist Lunga Ntila, died in August 2022 at twenty-seven. On “Running Away,” he says it once, plain. No swelling strings, no “this is my pain” framing. He’s talking about planning holidays with Xander, and Lunga never got to hear about it. He lands on, “I guess this is healing for us,” and then—immediately—he’s elsewhere: egos, Beatles comparisons, “Yoko-ing some Onos,” sore feet and knees, the distance between a shroom trip and the present.

That’s the trick After All keeps pulling: it won’t let grief be the only headline. It makes grief share space with bravado, weed smoke, body pain, and that weird modern humiliation of designer clothes not saving you from instability. A reasonable listener could call that avoidance. I think it’s closer to honesty—most people don’t grieve in clean chapters.

“Superhero” keeps that pressure on, but spreads it across relationships. Loss multiplies into silence: the friendship with Mark goes quiet after Ali passes, decades-long bonds drift, and suddenly “history” doesn’t protect anything. Vuyo’s at home shadowboxing with himself, writing poetry when he thinks he should be stacking wealth—like he can feel the clock and hates it.

Sarah Vestrheim takes the chorus—rising again, looking to the sky—and that choice matters. If Vuyo had sung that hook himself, it might’ve sounded like self-help. With Sarah, it becomes a stabilizing voice that keeps the song upright without denying how heavy it is.

I’ll admit: on first listen, I thought the chorus was almost too pretty for what he’s saying. On second listen, I realized that’s the point—the song needs a handrail or it just collapses.

The Center of the Album: “Survivor’s Guilt” Refuses to Flinch

Next comes the track that makes the whole project feel inevitable.

“Survivor’s Guilt” opens like a chant—three nearly identical sentences about apartheid shaping who he could and couldn’t be close to. Couldn’t move home because of self-apartheid. Barely met his sister because of apartheid. Hardly met his brother because of apartheid. The repetition isn’t poetic; it’s blunt-force insistence, like he’s pinning the listener to the wall: this is the root, don’t look away.

And then he swerves into a totally different grief file: his dog dying. It’s jarring in a way that feels intentional—like trauma doesn’t respect your narrative arc. Even uglier is the moment where a publicist frames pain as product, basically telling him his suffering is his to sell. That’s not a music-industry “critique” here; it sounds like a memory that still makes his jaw tighten.

The details after that get uncomfortably specific. He pays a woman’s bail, and the night she’s arrested she shows him photos of another man’s son. She’s sleeping with the homie and can’t leave the kid alone. On holidays, he says he was cosplaying a kid from the township while flashing white privilege, buying a hundred ounces like generosity can disinfect guilt. He names Mahosini. He names Ngaba. It’s not vague “I’ve been through things.” It’s receipts.

Then the second stanza strips even more: his father losing innocence through genocide, Vuyo growing up on Easy Street, never seeing homies die in front of him—only seeing them cry. The birthright mismatch between him and his siblings isn’t treated like a sad irony; it’s treated like an unpaid debt.

And when Junior tells him, “You’re just lucky,” Sarah grabs that line on the bridge and repeats it until it stops being a comment and becomes a weight. You can disagree with the framing—luck versus structure versus privilege—but the song is daring enough to say it clean.

“Dreamin’”: Moral Fury That Actually Earns Its Heat

After all that inward confession, the album pivots to anger that points outward—and I wasn’t totally sure it would work. Moral outrage in music can get corny fast when it’s detached from the artist’s own mess.

But “Dreamin’” lands because it comes with context. J’Von’s guest spot threads the same guilt theme from another angle—wishing someone were deleted so people could grieve them as a genius, then crashing into the image of a Palestinian kid who can’t eat while people tell him he needs Jesus. The line hits hard because it’s not abstract politics; it’s framed as a human failure, a grotesque mismatch between suffering and the cheap advice offered to it.

And crucially, J’Von has already admitted his own guilt—he’s specific about watching bread divide him from his brother. That detail makes the fury feel paid for. Not performative. Not trendy. Just hot.

Romance as Self-Sabotage: “After All” and “Peace”

Now the album starts aiming at the damage Vuyo personally caused, not just the damage done to him. And After All (the title track) is where the record gets almost embarrassing—in the best way. Vuyo calls himself Icarus, admits he came for lust, knew she was trouble, and still added himself to the problem like it was a hobby.

He talks about disrespecting the safe space she gave him. Then he’s in a Hyatt, scrolling her timeline, sleepless, while she’s telling him they’re better off friends. It’s pathetic in the human way—not the internet way.

Mac Ayres frames the song from the outside and then seals it shut with the bleakest question on the album: if you remove the vices, what’s left? Just another soul searcher saying nothing changes. Braxton Cook’s sax gives the track warmth the lyrics actively resist, and that tension is the whole point—comfort brushing up against self-disgust.

“Peace” goes even further and, honestly, it’s the song where Vuyo sounds most frighteningly lucid. He doesn’t blame a broken relationship on “timing” or “miscommunication.” He admits to demolishing something healthy. Netflix and chilling with messed-up women. Telling Nikki he’s tired of living life. Feeling nothing. Crying and still feeling hollow.

“Say hello to the narcissist
Left her at the hotel room like a misogynist
Take a look at my family portrait
Easy to see who the imposter is.”

A house in Chabo, he says, would mean more to him than a Grammy, and you believe him because the whole passage has been too ugly to be calculated.

If I have one mild complaint here, it’s that the emotional candor is so relentless that I sometimes wanted one extra musical left-turn—one moment where the instrumentation misbehaves, not just supports. The writing is doing backflips; the band mostly stays elegant. That’s tasteful, but a little too safe once or twice.

Sarah Vestrheim Isn’t a Feature—She’s the Counterweight

From here, it’s worth saying plainly: Sarah Vestrheim carries more of After All than people catch on a casual play. She isn’t sprinkled in to decorate the choruses. She’s functioning like a second conscience—sometimes tender, sometimes practical, sometimes quietly commanding.

“Head Over Heels” is where you hear it first. She builds a relationship out of unglamorous domestic details: leftover toothbrushes, sleeping in ripped rock band tees, self-tan on the sheets, irrational fears that make no sense until they do. Those images don’t “sound poetic.” They sound like being trapped in someone else’s bathroom at 2 a.m., realizing you live together now.

Then her second part shifts into the logistics of long-distance—middle-of-the-night calls, catching up before the next flight, tight layovers. It’s not romantic in the movie sense; it’s romantic in the “we’re exhausted but still trying” sense.

On “Heavenly,” she gets a full turn at the mic, and it feels like the album briefly hands her the steering wheel on purpose. It also drops what might be the most direct creative philosophy on the record—and it comes from her, not Vuyo: walls closing in, goosebumps, the only way to fail is to never begin, put it on paper, don’t think. That’s basically the mission statement of the whole project: stop posing, start confessing.

“You & I” flips the mood again. Vuyo gets playful—elevator sightings, bus stop moments, living on the twelfth floor listening to old Pac, and the extremely specific desire for a Ravenclaw instead of a Hufflepuff. It’s goofy, but it’s also revealing: after all the guilt and grief, he still wants a love that feels like a mental match, not just comfort.

Sarah’s lines about swimming in an eternity reflected in someone’s eyes keep the tenderness from turning syrupy. And on “Answers,” she compares catching feelings to catching colds, needing special medicine, asking for something constant among ebbs and flows. Small performance, big job: she stops Vuyo’s confession streak from becoming a one-man show.

Arguable claim: without Sarah’s presence, this album risks turning into a diary you weren’t meant to read. With her, it becomes an actual conversation.

GiddyGang’s Production: Warm, Jazzy, and Quietly Stubborn

The band’s production is one of the album’s sneakiest strengths because it doesn’t beg for attention. Trombone and keys give the songs a jazz-soul glow that separates After All from the usual rapper-plus-beats dynamic. And more importantly, the band understands negative space—when to push, when to thin out, when to let a line land in silence.

“Sunshine” is the clearest example of that restraint doing real work. Vuyo names depression outright and calls it something you have to conquer. Then he pivots into a harsher modern truth: music turning into a numbers game, where someone can build an entire project off TikTok fame. He applauds rappers he considers worse than him, but they whisper asking who the better MC is. He even names Ivan Ave and tells people not to pit them against each other.

Then the second half turns into the album’s simplest plea—and maybe its most convincing: don’t let ego get between you and your people, make sure everyone eats, jealousy has killed more than equality ever has. “It takes a village” lands here not as a slogan, but as a survival tactic.

“Heavenly” adds another contradiction the album seems addicted to: Vuyo at the crossroads of homelessness and sipping Cristal, basically saying if you heard it in a bar, you can be sure he lived it. That line could sound like bragging in a different artist’s mouth. Here it sounds like a grim little receipt.

And yeah, I kept waiting for one more track to hit the level of “Survivor’s Guilt” or “Peace,” especially because the project is short. But the funny thing is: the shortness is also the discipline. Thirty-six minutes is the right container for material this dense. Any longer and the admissions would start smearing together. Here, each one gets clean air.

Conclusion

After All isn’t trying to be “deep.” It’s trying to be precise—about guilt, about romance, about the way loss sits next to daily nonsense and still wins. The band keeps it warm, Sarah keeps it human, and Vuyo keeps it uncomfortably specific, like he’d rather risk looking bad than risk sounding vague.

Our verdict: People who like rap and soul when it’s used as a confessional booth (not a highlight reel) will actually love this album. If you need your music to “escape,” or you flinch when artists admit they’re the villain in their own story, After All will feel like being trapped in an honest conversation you didn’t schedule.

FAQ

• What is the core theme of After All? Guilt—survivor’s guilt, romantic guilt, family guilt—treated as something you live with daily, not a one-time epiphany.
• Is After All more rap or more soul? It’s rap-led, but the live-band jazz-soul backbone (keys, trombone, warm arrangements) shapes how the verses land.
• Which tracks hit the hardest emotionally? “Survivor’s Guilt” is the gut-punch centerpiece, and “Peace” is the most blunt about self-sabotage.
• What role does Sarah Vestrheim play on the album? She’s a real second voice—grounding the narrative with domestic detail, long-distance reality, and a surprisingly direct creative ethos.
• Is the album too short? I wanted one more peak-level track, but the short runtime also keeps the confessions from blurring into mush.

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