Navy Blue has always rapped like someone guiding you through a threshold—out of a low-ceilinged tunnel, into the cold morning air, reminding you to breathe as the world regains its shape. Sage Elsesser’s voice carries a calm severity, equal parts mantra and murmured confession, a groundedness that feels earned rather than assumed. Since his 2020 debut Àdá Irin, he’s been chiseling away at everything extraneous in his music, stripping his craft to its barest emotional grain. The beats have gradually become less scaffolding than atmosphere: looping phrases of vinyl static, frayed piano, paper-thin percussion, all orbiting around his voice like gravity. With each record, Elsesser has tried to articulate a purer version of himself—and with The Sword & The Soaring, he finally sounds like he’s carved down to something elemental.
Elsesser has long gravitated toward solemnity, though his austerity is frequently punctured by moments of grace. At its worst, the restraint risks calcifying—as on Navy’s Reprise—but he has a knack for aligning himself with producers who add back soul in unexpected ways. Ways of Knowing warmed his palette, Budgie’s crate-dug textures pulling Navy Blue toward sermons that felt equal parts hopeful and wounded. But after being dropped by Def Jam in 2024, Elsesser returned to independence with a series of loose, introspective sketches shadowed by the ghost of a shelved project. You could hear him trying to refocus the lens, unsure of the final picture.
The Sword & The Soaring is the moment the haze lifts. Framed by the figure of the Archangel Michael—a symbol that bridges Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—the album feels haunted by the presence of people who fought for him and people he still fights for. The 16 tracks build a world where ancestorhood is ongoing, spectral, and deeply personal. It’s his most affecting work since the masterful Song of Sage: Post Panic!: tender but unflinching, fully aware of its despair without being swallowed by it. The album sits in that rare space between resignation and renewal, finding clarity in the quietest emotional apertures.
At 28, Elsesser is no longer obscuring autobiography behind cryptic fragments. He lets his life spill into the songs with a startling clarity. On “God’s Kingdom,” he conjures scenes so intimate they feel fossilized—tracing family lineage from Beale Street to the Mississippi water that steadies him. “If Only…” flattens time completely: a plainspoken address to his father that lands like handwritten truth, unadorned and devastating. His presence feels less like someone rapping and more like someone sitting across from you, piecing together his past with trembling deliberate care.
Candor is the album’s through-line, even when Elsesser lets thoughts flicker and vanish before they fully form. On “Guardadas,” he murmurs, “Felt love too scared to enact it,” dissolving the phrase into the harp like vapor. Elsewhere, he toggles between grief and gratitude with liturgical calm. Over a sleazy sax loop on the opener, he raps, “One thing about me is I’m grateful for it all,” the line landing like a vow, an exhale, and a bruise.
The production—handled by Navy Blue, Child Actor, Chris Keys, Graymatter, Foisey, and others—moves like a single elegant cipher. Piano figures droop into lush strings; wind effects swirl like mythic weather; samples moan above him like ancestors calling back. “Sunlight of the Spirit” plays like a three-way dialogue between Elsesser, a disembodied choir, and a flute that punctuates his phrases like a guiding spirit. When he finally lets his voice rise—most strikingly on the orchestral surge of “Tale of Truth”—you can feel the room expand.
Even in the album’s heaviest moments, Elsesser radiates a stubborn belief in forward motion. His brother, his “guardian angel,” and the late Ka hover throughout the record; childhood regret tugs at his sleeve. But he keeps choosing to push through the wreckage. On “24 Gospel,” the album’s lone collaboration, Elsesser and Earl Sweatshirt swap the kind of weather-beaten wisdom that comes only from surviving yourself: “The past don’t hurt as much as it did,” Elsesser insists, sounding like he believes it for the first time.
The Sword & The Soaring is not a victory lap—it’s a steadying of the soul. A document of someone who has been reshaped by loss but not defined by it. Elsesser emerges here with his clearest vision yet, using the rubble of his past as fertile ground. It’s the sound of someone learning, quietly and persistently, how to keep rising.
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