Review | Noname is rapping about the end of the world in her inside … – The Washington Post

Noname might reside on the holy texts/Yellow Pages side of the valley, but she’s ultimately in her own zone, rapping with breezy conversationality, even when her lyrics feel as if they could be measured in metric tons. The latent excitement in her music radiates from the friction of making complicated truths sound simple — something you can hear loud and clear on the Chicago-raised rapper’s deeply self-possessed new album, “Sundial,” but even louder and clearer when she’s verbalizing her truth onstage.

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At the Fillmore Silver Spring on Monday night, her set list included all 11 cuts from “Sundial,” and she delivered each of them without the help of any prerecorded backing vocals. Instead, flanked by a five-piece band — keys, bass, drums, two singers — the 32-year-old rapper exuded a singular confidence, refusing to plead, preach or scold, only stepping out of her coolest inside voice during the hook of “Oblivion” to declare, “When the world blow up, that’s it!” It felt like the most cleareyed apocalypse song since Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War.”

As straightforward as her music sounds, Noname says “Sundial” is complicated. “The album is really just a look at Blackness, Black culture, our community, and how we’ve contributed [to causing harm] in some ways,” she told Pitchfork last month, “and how sometimes it’s uncomfortable to have that conversation.” Yet, in song, she never seems to flinch. On Monday night, during “Namesake,” she delivered dazzling rhymes with chitchat nonchalance: “Cry me a river, you could cry me a metaphor/ A megaphone screaming out/ Dream about revolution, air pollution/ Same solution: socialism.”

After making her politics plain in the first verse, Noname silenced her band and proceeded to put various pop stars on blast for performing at the Super Bowl: “Go, Rihanna, go/ Watch the fighter jet fly high/ War machine gets glamorized/ We play the game to pass the time.” Then, after swapping Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé into the refrain, she pointed at herself for accepting an invitation to play Coachella earlier this year: “I said I wouldn’t perform for them/ And somehow I still fell in line.” (One of many reasons Coachella is ugly: Philip Anschutz, owner of the festival’s parent company, has a history of donating money to groups with anti-LGBTQ+ ties.)

But ultimately, it was the improvised finale of “Namesake” that made for the most contemplative moment of the night, with Noname transforming a classic call-and-response routine into a wild riddle. “What’s my name?” she asked the crowd, her syllables locked to the rhythm. When hundreds of voices shouted “Noname,” it felt like a cosmic joke, a philosophical repartee, a communal ego-death ritual and, somehow, a party.