Navy Blue raps as though he’s leading you out of a dark, damp tunnel and into the light. His voice is measured and restrained, often strident, as if he’s talking you through breathing exercises to ground you in the throes of a panic attack. Since Sage Elsesser’s debut LP as Navy Blue, 2020’s Àdá Irin, he’s been paring his music down to be the purest elemental reflection of his heart. Recently, he’s taken to spitting over beats that seem to bear all responsibility for providing his songs with entropy, grafting sample loops and the odd spare instrumental accoutrement onto his voice to give his delivery a necessary weight. Only the vital seems destined to remain in his soliloquies.
Elsesser has continually embraced the solemn, though often it’s tinged with gratitude and catharsis. The approach can verge on restricting—as on 2021’s Navy’s Reprise, whose production felt perfunctory—but he sometimes salvages it through nimble decisions. 2023’s Ways of Knowing, for example, dripped with soul thanks to producer Budgie’s crate-digging touch, letting Elsesser oscillate between hopeful and forlorn sermons. Since getting dropped by Def Jam in early 2024, Elsesser’s venture back into independence has been marked by meandering, introspective exercises in scope and focus, guided by the spectre of an indefinitely shelved project.
But any danger of malaise is absent from his sixth album, The Sword & The Soaring. The motif of the Archangel Michael, an important figure in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, looms over the 16 tracks, creating the sensation that those who passed are watching over us (and fighting on our behalf), even as the pain of their departure remains fresh and as further difficult lessons await on the horizon. Underneath that cover lies Elsesser’s most evocative work since 2020’s stellar opus Song of Sage: Post Panic!—tender, wrought musings that stretch out over the supremely lush 44-minute landscape, an album that finds comfort in hopelessness without falling victim to its intoxicating caress.
