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A document of self, an accounting of life right now, a portrait of Blackness in Canada in 2025: With Make Way, Anthony OKS is holding space for the intimate and the universal. 

“I’m just a shell of what I could be,” OKS (aka Anthony Sannie) laments over Clement Sackey’s languid piano on the album’s wistful opening track, “Warning Signs,” setting the listener up for a journey through the artist’s uncertainties, hopes, and personal traumas, including depression and the fragilities of life. “I’m preparing to celebrate, but before then, I need to purge the anxieties in my life,” he says. That purge results in 12 hip hop songs bolstered by Hiphop storytelling and jazz flair.

Produced by longtime collaborator Paalsh at Private Ear in Winnipeg—Jean-Luc Loiselle and Daniel ‘Goldstripes’ Desir also contribute beats—Sannie is both lighter and darker here than on his 2021 EP, In the Garden, which too asked big questions in the wake of Black Lives Matter, and found him reckoning with a new family history. He delves deeper into that history on “Walkaway,” interrogating the generational trauma inherited by people of colour, imploring oblivious observers over and over: “Don’t walk away from me, I need you to see, I need you to hear.”

That need extends into “Isolation.” Its lush production (by Loiselle), cymbal-forward beat and melodic synth provide the backdrop as OKS lays out his fears and loneliness as a Black man in verse. His open-hearted plea is sung: “But if you see me slipping, know that I could use your help.” Fear is also a theme of “Handz Out,” which finds him fretting over finances and the looming threat of lacking money. “This song serves as a reminder,” he says, “that we cannot wait on others for our stability.”

A handful of tracks narrow the aperture to focus on the personal—specifically the cost of post-pandemic individualism to the collective community at large. On “Mind Shiftin’,” featuring a guest vocal from Nu Baby, OKS worries about his own state of being in the face of a daunting list: “social divisions between communities, the weaponization of social media, the messianic complex of influencers, and the rampant spread of misinformation in politics and online discourse,” he says.

“Unfathomable” puts a more positive spin on the subject, with its knowing refrain of “You can hide all you want from your truth, but all you are is what you believe in,” where OKS recognizes all we can do is move forward while recognizing our vulnerabilities. He pushes his voice to its highest register in “Perpetuity,” detailing how his mental health struggles affect his day to day and his life at large in a rich falsetto. “There is also an appreciation,” he notes, “for how hard things can feel sometimes.” “I Wouldn’t Change” flips that script—underscored by Rowan Greger’s honey saxophone line—to acknowledge that for all the hard things, OKS is happy to have lived this life: “And if it all burns up I / wouldn’t change a damn thing.”

Deep in the tracklist is “Auntie’s Poem,” an acapella rendering of a piece written and performed by Chimwemwe Undi, the poet laureate of Winnipeg. “In my city, she holds a special place for artists,” says OKS. “This poem embodies the beauty and strength of our Black mothers. I think of my grandma and her relationship with my mother. I wanted to celebrate Black women.”

Undi’s poetry leads into “Centrepiece,” OKS’s celebration of his late grandmother, who passed suddenly. “A true matriarch, the queen, the heartbeat of this cocoa butter family” is how he describes her, before outlining her encouragement of his dreams, and his inability to get over the loss. 

Locked in his feelings, OKS closes out Make Way with the cello-glazed “I Hid,” the LP’s most emotive and vulnerable track, listing regrets and apologies. But it’s also its most hopeful, encouraging the people in his life to keep striving, keep wanting, keep making things better. “I’ll be in your corner for you,” he promises. “I’m rooting for you too.”