Noname – Sundial (Album Review)

Sundial is the anticipated second studio album from Chicago-based rapper Noname. Since the release of the critically acclaimed Room 25¸ Noname has mostly kept herself out of the limelight, only giving fans hints of a new release over the past few years. Despite knowing about the praises of Room 25¸ I have never heard a single track from Noname.

I’ve heard many reviewers not only say that her debut was one of the best albums of 2018 but one of the best albums of that decade point blank. Sundial is going to be a deep dive for me, jumping headfirst into Noname’s music, and I interested to hear the rest.

I also want to bring up the themes heard throughout Sundial as a quick disclaimer. Noname makes no attempt to hold back her Afro-centric and left-wing political beliefs, which are opposed to my own. However, as I have consistently done with other albums, I take my biases out when I listen and only pay attention to the quality of the music. While I may not agree with many of the lyrics, I’ll give credit when I see maturity and clever wordplay.

The album starts with “black mirror”, a song that has some interesting production choices. The beat and instrumentation sound like something I would’ve heard from Tyler the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, being nice and soothing until we get to Noname’s performance. To be extremely sincere, I am not sold on her style of rapping. Granted, not all of it is bad, as I’ll mention in the next couple of tracks, but it’s a huge turn-off for me musically. The biggest issue I hear is Noname’s disjointed flow that does nothing to compliment the beat. We get some more of this on the next track “hold me down”, which has a chorus that suspiciously sounds a lot like J. Cole’s “Love Yourz” (his influence in this album is apparent).

Another issue that I hear can be seen in the track “balloons”, the lead single on the album featuring Jay Electronica and Eryn Allen Kane. While Noname’s flow is much better compared to the last two tracks, her voice doesn’t help. Hearing her sing the chorus feels awkward, like a middle-school student trying out on her second week of choir practice. If Noname had a good voice, this album would’ve been much more tolerable.

Fortunately, the album starts to pick up.

Starting with “boomboom”, which includes one of the best performances from Noname, we get the start of a very good track run that takes over the core of the album. “potentially the interlude” might betray its name, but it gives us more hard-hitting verses that I was expecting to hear, though I thought the beat was a little boring. However, that is not the case for “namesake”, easily the best song on the album, with fantastic lyricism and wordplay, along with a great beat and percussions that compliment it. The track “beauty supply” has clever wordplay that matches the overall metaphor of the song, along with tasty guitars and a wonderful sax solo to finish it off.

But, as usual, the ride stops here, and just when I was starting to have fun.

The next track, “toxic”, is the worst song of the album by far. Not only does it have the most atrociously sung chorus on the record, paired with more poorly timed flows, but it also has a criminally boring beat that sounds like something out of a YouTube lo-fi study playlist. In contrast, “afro-futurism” has a pretty nice beat, but that’s pretty much all I can say about it.

The last two songs are further extend the snooze-fest that are only carried by their features. “gospel?” does include a cool gospel sample in the beginning, but Noname proceeds to give a tiresome performance reflecting the beat. While I wasn’t all that impressed with billy woods’ performance (coming from a billy woods fan), I thought he did a good enough job to make this song tolerable to bear through. “oblivion” has a groovy beat but includes a horrendous chorus by Noname. However, when Ayoni takes the mic, it’s a complete 180, giving a good performance like she did in “boomboom”. Common also has a few verses on the track (too few, if you ask me) with great lyricism, but I also found his overall performance to be lackluster.

Here are my ratings for each song on a scale of 0-4:

1. black mirror – 2
2. hold me down (featuring Jimetta Rose and Voices of Creation) – 2
3. balloons (featuring Jay Electronica and Eryn Allen Kane) – 3
4. boomboom (featuring Ayoni) – 4
5. potentially the interlude – 3
6. namesake – 4
7. beauty supply – 4
8. toxic – 0
9. Afro-futurism – 1
10. gospel? (featuring $ilkroad, billy woods, and STOUT) – 1
11. oblivion (featuring Common and Ayoni) – 2

SCORE/Mediocre: Perhaps it’s my fault that I came into this album with high expectations, but I have to say that I’m disappointed in what I’ve heard. After listening to the album and coming to my initial conclusion, I saw the scores for Sundial, with all the major publishers giving it an 8 or higher (Anthony Fantano, however, gave it a 5). It’s hard to see why this album is receiving such praise with Noname’s bad flows and production choices that we’ve already seen in past albums that have done it better. From her performance, it’s even harder for me to say that she has any talent to begin with, though I will reserve that comment for when I listen to Room 25. I guess I’ll make up my mind then. For now, I would advise Noname to stick to what she knows best – poetry – preferably not spoken.

(We rank albums on a scale of: Poor, Mediocre, Good, Excellent, Outstanding).