The more time passes, the more you have to respect a rapper who needn’t anything flashy about their beats to make every word hit its mark. Navy Blue, the moniker of Brooklyn rapper, producer, fashion model, and skateboarder Sage Elsesser, has been on a consistent roll with putting substance behind his rhyme craft over all else since his 2020 breakthrough debut, Àdá Irin, and has remained annually prolific in the hip-hop underground scene in the years since before ultimately landing on Def Jam for last year’s assured Ways of Knowing.

While he cleaned up the feverish, abstract-soul sound that had come to define he and his peers Earl Sweatshirt, Armand Hammer, MIKE, and Wiki in recent years in favor of more ornate, polished contours running alongside an understated beat eloquence, those fluid bars in the face of Navy Blue’s existential strife remain his strongest fete. Memoirs In Armour — returning to independence through Elsesser’s Freedom Sounds — isn’t taking any sharp detours in that regard despite it being a lower profile label release. If anything, it hears Navy Blue more aware of the impact of his word and his place in the world, reconsidering the value of what a rub with fame can get you in the long run.

Grief that has audibly weighed down heavy on his heart until Ways of Knowing is now transformed into a case of “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” He’s going deep into the self-searching from a spiritual POV and using that new found enlightenment to fill the voids money doesn’t always have an answer for. Behind the mood board, guest producers like Budgie Beats, Child Actor, and Chuck Strangers drop in to lend a hand in its gleaming chopped and screwed soul effect reflecting emotive states in textures somewhere between a rock and a hard place and an hour glass’ quicksand, but it’s a light lift with Elsesser already having a firm handle on steering his own ship toward a higher conscious. The work of all these years of reflection renders a rapper who knows himself better than ever.

Highlights: “Boulder”, “Low Threshold”, “Running Sand”,

Navy Blue’s Memoirs In Armour is available now on Freedom Sounds.

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