Halfway through “Circa,” a highlight of the exquisite new Navy Blue record, Sage Elsesser asks the question central to his work: “Can’t you see that it’s all cyclical?” He’s emphasizing the fact that grief is nonlinear and unavoidable, but he places the question at the end of his verse, leaving it hanging in the air. The broad themes of Navy Blue’s music—depression, trauma, resilience, joy—are not static, unchanging experiences. They can come in waves, crashing violently against you before retreating to rebuild their energy. If you can recognize the patterns, the intervals at which they appear, you might be able to plant firmer feet, to better withstand the next volley. But it takes effort. You have to step outside yourself, observe your life from your shadow’s point of view.
Over the course of nine records, Elsesser has repeatedly attempted to look in the mirror with fresh eyes. His early, anonymous SoundCloud drops were hushed and hesitant, a shroud of tape hiss and white noise between himself and true self-examination. He began to clear the cobwebs away with 2020’s Àdá Irin and Song of Sage: Post Panic!, sparse but enveloping records where he more freely revealed his psyche to the world, and to himself. By 2023’s Ways of Knowing, he was rapping over crystalline, pastel-colored soul, fully embracing a vulnerability he may not have known how to access previously. That record came out on Def Jam, which unceremoniously dropped him after he’d finished its follow-up. He left feeling ambivalent about his time on a major label (“I guess I’m grateful for the experience,” he shrugged to Rolling Stone), feeling like he’d drifted away from his origins. To regroup, he vowed to get back to his humble, lo-fi roots, trading expensive studios for his “shitty couch” and a decent mic. The cycle started anew.
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Sir Render, Navy Blue’s latest dispatch from inner space, completes a trilogy he started after Def Jam cut him loose. Its first installment, 2024’s Memoirs in Armour, was concerned with all manner of death, from the physical end guaranteed to us to the emotional flattening that can result from untreated mental health issues. Some forms can be conquered, he seemed to posit, and I need to learn which. In 2025, he released its sequel, The Sword & the Soaring, a sumptuous album that balances blinding hope and searing anger, sounding bruised but triumphant. “I woke up yet again/My story known to never end,” he snarls on “Tale of Truth,” the couplet’s celebratory message dipped in acid. He fashions Sir Render as a prequel to the previous two, detailing the dark and dizzying moments before his quest for a spiritual reckoning began. It’s as radiant as the previous two, full of sweeping strings and reverberant piano, and despite its focus on the tolls of uncertainty, it’s the most surefooted music Elsesser has made.
Navy excels at untangling human emotions and picking through them without being didactic or moralistic. The trilogy’s other entries were defined by clear goals: understanding and accepting mortality, reconciling fury and peace, the ability to acknowledge grief and grow around it. Here, Navy writes about the period of confusion before those goals can be clearly articulated, when feelings are too big to grasp and make us wobble under their weight. One minute, you’re on top of the world, fueled by your strengths and abilities, like the moment on “Reflections” where Elsesser ponders how his name relates to his personality: “I ain’t got a name, kin/Sage is a title.” The next, self-loathing takes over, as on “The Birth of Medicine,” where he asks himself, teary-eyed, “Is this who I wanna be?” That churning mix of confidence and doubt gives Sir Render a full-bodied dynamism that Navy Blue albums can sometimes lack, moving between moods instead of circling around a single frame of mind.
