OKAY!

Forrest Frank has built a large, young audience since launching his solo career out of the duo Surfaces, largely by compressing worship-pop into tight, hook-driven packages that behave more like contemporary pop singles than traditional congregational music – and “OKAY!,” released in May, is a clean example of that approach at its most direct. At under three minutes, the song is built almost entirely around its title and refrain: a simple, repeated reassurance that things are, and will be, okay, delivered over bright, uncomplicated production built for a phone speaker as much as for a church sound system.

That simplicity is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation of craft – Frank’s catalog has consistently favored directness and repetition over lyrical complexity, betting that a short, instantly memorable comfort song will travel further with a young, online-first audience than a more theologically developed one would. On its own terms, that bet mostly pays off: “OKAY!” is genuinely catchy, and the production’s lightness matches the lyric’s intent well, never over-dramatizing a message that’s explicitly about calm rather than catharsis.

Where the song comes up shorter is in what it leaves out. Reassurance without much specific content underneath it can read as comforting in the moment and forgettable shortly after, and “OKAY!” doesn’t do much to earn its own reassurance beyond asserting it repeatedly – there’s no real turn, no specific image or story grounding the comfort in anything beyond the title phrase itself. For a song this short, that’s a defensible trade. For a song hoping to stick beyond a single listen, it’s the thing holding it back from matching its own catchiness.

6.9/10 – genuinely catchy and well-pitched to its audience, but thinner on substance than its hook deserves.

Hero image: “OKAY!” single cover art. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.