Navy Blue raps as if he’s main you out of a darkish, damp tunnel and into the sunshine. His voice is measured and restrained, usually strident, as if he’s speaking you thru respiratory workouts to floor you within the throes of a panic assault. Since Sage Elsesser’s debut LP as Navy Blue, 2020’s Àdá Irin, he’s been paring his music all the way down to be the purest elemental reflection of his coronary heart. Not too long ago, he’s taken to spitting over beats that appear to bear all duty for offering his songs with entropy, grafting pattern loops and the odd spare instrumental accoutrement onto his voice to provide his supply a vital weight. Solely the very important appears destined to stay in his soliloquies.
Elsesser has regularly embraced the solemn, although usually it’s tinged with gratitude and catharsis. The method can verge on limiting—as on 2021’s Navy’s Reprise, whose manufacturing felt perfunctory—however he typically salvages it by nimble choices. 2023’s Methods of Figuring out, for instance, dripped with soul because of producer Budgie’s crate-digging contact, letting Elsesser oscillate between hopeful and forlorn sermons. Since getting dropped by Def Jam in early 2024, Elsesser’s enterprise again into independence has been marked by meandering, introspective workouts in scope and focus, guided by the spectre of an indefinitely shelved venture.
However any hazard of malaise is absent from his sixth album, The Sword & The Hovering. The motif of the Archangel Michael, an necessary determine in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, looms over the 16 tracks, creating the feeling that those that handed are watching over us (and combating on our behalf), even because the ache of their departure stays contemporary and as additional tough classes await on the horizon. Beneath that cowl lies Elsesser’s most evocative work since 2020’s stellar opus Music of Sage: Submit Panic!—tender, wrought musings that stretch out over the supremely lush 44-minute panorama, an album that finds consolation in hopelessness with out falling sufferer to its intoxicating caress.
