Enough time has passed for me to admit that I thought Room 25 was a poor album. I suspect there's a lot of Trump-era literature that will age poorly in much the same way, which is not to say that it was "too political" but that we found ourselves, briefly, in a time where we were comfortable mistaking incohesion for deconstructionist ambition and poorly-recycled Twitter bits (imagine the mockery if Drake had rapped "I’m struggling to simmer down, maybe I'm an insomni-black") for cleverness. It was a disappointing sophomore release [1] from a great artist, and I suspect many of its laudits — not unlike Dedication — came more from critics wanting to honor the artist's previous work.
I say this as a precursor to Sundial addressing almost every flaw of Room 25. Noname's politics are sharper and more honest; she conjures again the intimacy that made Telefone such a treat; the production shifts away from a slightly schizophrenic neo-soul thing back to the (Saba-inflected) light jazz rap. Sundial is (and I don't mean this in a faint-praise way) coherent; it sounds like an obvious evolution of her work and her thesis rather than a rush to get something out the door while everyone's listening.
Her studio debut, sure, but calling Telefone a mixtape feels like a distinction without a difference. ↩︎
★★★★
