Hi, everyone. Stressthony Outtano here, the internet's busiest music nerd. It's time for a review of this new Navy Blue album, The Sword & the Soaring.

Here we have a brand new LP from prolific rapper, producer, songwriter Navy Blue, also known as Sage Gabriel Carlos Atreyu Elsesser. This guy has been a multifaceted creative for years now. He's worked in skating, fashion, the visual arts too, also doing art direction for Earl Sweatshirt's I Don't Like Shit record.

And given that, I guess it makes sense that he would eventually make his way into music, too, professionally. He really began to make waves solo at the turn of the 2020s with some pretty impressive releases, most notably, Song of Sage: Post Panic!, a project that stylistically may have blended in more than it varied from the prevailing abstract hip-hop trends at the time, but it was still with a lot of thoughtful personal lyricism. And there was a cool authoritative charisma to Sage's flows and vocal delivery on this record, too.

He has dropped a bunch of follow-ups to this album since, some less memorable than others, though he has kept up a pretty admirable output schedule, making at least some noise every year. Even if he's not leaving a whole lot of room to grow and evolve in between releases.

However, Sage's creative story is one of gradual improvements and increased exposure. He even landed a pretty decent album on Def Jam Records back in 2023, though the very scant follow-up to that project in 2024, Memoirs in Armour, I didn't really get quite as much out of.

Either way, I decided to check in on Sage's yearly offering here, dropped it in November, really trying to get it in before 2025 is over. And honestly, I think it may be his best work yet.

Sage's creative methods on this are simple but effective. You have a lot of beautiful contemplative instrumentals built upon various sample fragments of piano, and strings, and the like. And, on top of all of this, he delivers these poetic ruminations on family, God, life, and love. And there's a lot of interconnectedness between all of these things.

On the opening track, for example, Sage goes into how his own experiences and emotional struggles inform his creative process:

"Story of the bloodletter
The stake of hate which I was untethered
Taught me how to love better
Every time I write it's like a love letter
Thoughts start to flow
An erosion from where the flood measured"

All of which fit perfectly against these chilly piano arpeggios and horns, which are so bear, so stark, so lonely, and really make you feel every word coming out of Sage's mouth.

I love the perfect and smooth segue this track makes into the following "Orchards". This track brings some hypnotic drum loops, also some ghostly vocal chops, as well. The occasional weepy string lead that provides at least a little bit of structure to the song. And, while Sage's musings on this track may be loose, they are lucid as he tosses out these realizations about maturing divine lessons. Also realizing the consequences and effects of his actions.

We have more spiritual notions and the mourning of past family members on the following "God's Kingdom", which features this combination of plucky strings and keys that sound like they're warped by tape. It's a very beautifully eerie sound and, again, pairs well with Sage's poetry, which makes him feel like he's just one star in an endless galaxy.

Meanwhile, the instrumentation on "Sunlight of the Spirit" may sound a little more easygoing by comparison. But Sage actually does pack some of his most sobering bars into this track:

"Too much of this too much of that
A touch of death a touch of wrath
Was in the future, in the past
How long it's all gone last
You won't know if you don't ask
Can't see the wings on your own back
Can't fly through a slow track
Childhood trauma make you grow fast"

And, while the progression across this tracklist is incremental, I love how much more intense Sage's vocals and flows get on "My Heartbeat" as well as "Tale of Truth", on the latter of which I feel like Sage truly embodies the mind and tone of a poet. Also, shout out to the random "Dead Poet Society" drop in the midst of the record.

On the song "Kindred Spirit", we get lyrical explorations into love of many different kinds. Different flavors of partnership and kinship. If anything, this track is another of many reflections on this record of, again, that interconnectedness I talked about earlier. Which is something I just personally find to be really refreshing about this album in an age where there is so much talk about atomization, the isolation that your average person feels on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, we have Sage here who's almost every thought on this record is impacted or haunted by the idea of how he is connected to another person, whether it be a friend or a relative or a lover. There's so much writing and lyricism out there devoted to the singular perspective, the individual experience. Which on some level is valid, but I also think to a degree is a bit of a façade, because, at the end of the day, no man is an island. And Sage, throughout this record, just so wholeheartedly embraces that fact and explores it more deeply than I think anybody else has in 2025 on a rap record.

Case in point, the song "If Only" is a beautiful and heart-wrenching cut about just basically how Sage struggles with longing for a connection with his father. There are more details to dig into deeper into the album on tracks that are also nestled into beautiful, breathtaking, simple, and I would say, very delicate and serene instrumentals.

But so much of what Sage speaks to on this album is so personal and so specific and so intimate, I fear reinterpreting it too much may end up in me giving an inaccurate assessment of the experiences or interactions that informed his writing on this project. Like during moments when he's saying: "I lost my brother but I'm grateful to have found a few / And hurt people do recover if they face the truth / What's the root? From here I blossom to awake a new".

But what I can speak to is the emotional impact and experience of listening to this album in that nearly all the tracks here, and there's 16 of them in the mix, feel like powerful revelations and emotionally intelligent dissections of personal experiences, interpersonal connections.

It's like that feeling you get of emotionally, mentally, clouds parting or like a weight being lifted off of your shoulders once you've really done the internal work necessary to know yourself, to understand what you want out of life. And also reassessing connections and experiences where maybe you were operating in a way that was dysfunctional, or maybe you didn't have a full and complete grasp of your self-worth. The kind of clarity that you reach after you have done that and achieved that, that's what listening to this album feels like. As pretty much the entire run time of this thing is decked out in kindness, hope, gratitude, as well as curiosity, but still somehow doesn't come across as corny or overly sentimental.

If there is a downside to this album, though, I would say it's that the loose, abstract, occasionally drumless forms these songs take do get a little stale after a while. Or leave me feeling like maybe the record could have had a bit more oomph, a bit more structure, a bit more punch. Also, sometimes on this record, Sage is just so mystified and enamored with his own perception of the world and its depth, him perceiving his perception as deep — if you get what I'm saying — that it comes across maybe a slight bit pretentious.

However, much of the time when it comes to writing emotionally sharp and cerebral lines, I do think Sage very much is the real deal and occasionally does remind me of a much younger version of greats such as Ka or Common. I mean, he uses this very play-on-words on this record in so many ways, but he does sound quite sage-ly, which is why I'm feeling a decent to strong 8 on this record.

Anthony Fantano, Navy Blue, forever.