Noname brings the intimate conversations of Sundial to the Vic

The songs of Chicago rapper Noname feel like opening a door into a roomful of friends who are already hours into an all-consuming conversation. Throughout her self-released new third full-length, Sundial, she cracks jokes, asks questions about race and Blackness that you’ll need to sit with, thinks out loud about how her skills create demand for her hip-hop persona via capitalist forces she’d rather abolish, and reflects on her mistakes in order to hold herself accountable and give herself the grace to move forward. On “Namesake,” she manages this all in less than three minutes, speeding through a locomotive bass line and a skipping drum break. I’m not even sure she takes a breath between criticizing superstars (Rihanna, Beyoncé, Kendrick) for supporting the military-industrial complex with their Super Bowl performances and poking fun at herself for playing Coachella after publicly saying she never wanted to.

I don’t have room here to collect all my thoughts about Sundial, and I’m sure they’ll change anyhow. I’m willing to bet Noname prefers it that way. Her second verse on “Balloons” critiques white listeners who come across as exploitative in their desire to witness Black performers describe their trauma onstage. It’s one of her best performances on Sundial, but it’s gotten lost in a flurry of complaints about alleged anti-Semitism in the verse that Jay Electronica contributed to the song. I’m a white Jewish music journalist who’s spent much of his career writing about hip-hop, and I hate that the discussion of “Balloons” was almost instantly warped to be all about that guest verse. “We do need to have a conversation in the Black community about antisemitism and why it’s running rampant,” Noname told the TRiiBE in August. I don’t care to admonish Noname for lyrics she didn’t write—I prefer to hear her out, since so much of her work is about finding a meaningful path toward liberation and allowing people to make mistakes and grow from them. Because Sundial was created as a conversation, the way we receive, perceive, and interact with it will evolve. That’s true of every album, of course, but I think this one is better suited for reinterpretation as time goes on. As with all Noname’s previous work, I look forward to continuing to listen to it.