When the morning came on June 5th, I wanted to wake the entire neighborhood to Sir Render . All I could think about the night before was blasting the new Navy Blue, né Sage Elsesser, from my room. I only hesitated because I knew it would feel better listening with over ear bluetooth headphones and warm black tea instead. When I first pressed play, I heard ocean waves, sea birds, and horses appear as the sun shines gracefully on the string section, raising the curtains, dimming the lights for a figure to slowly appear.
I immediately started to think about the album trailer, “Ocean Light (Phase 1: Prelude)”, which had similar foley sounds, but coated with a grimmer feeling. The Sir Render rollout started with the “Ocean Light” music video: a montage of rain, faces painted in light, shadows on the rise, and the terrible beauties of nature (You can even spot the sculpture used for the album cover teased throughout the video). But, the closing lines started echoing in my mind, “A tale told backwards / Memories in armour went missing in action / Sitting in the ward, thinking of the sword / He met his reflection in the light of the Lord”.
As the “Commencement” begins, I started to think more about what Sage meant. Where does Sir Render fit into the series involving Memoirs in Armour and The Sword & The Soaring ? I allowed myself to get lost in thought for a moment, then slowly, Navy Blue appeared in the distance, with The Alchemist striding beside him on the second track, “Baron”.
“Threw my problems on the rhythm / Wish it wasn’t true, but, trust it is/ Light jog, I gotta run to live / This is life, I’ve had enough of me, so let ‘em hide / It’s on my mind, all day / All day, I’m done with getting high / It’s like the first time breathin’, see it to believe it / ‘Cause I am what I believe in / Breathe in, breathe out, take a moment just to be again / Another round, I’m on the ropes, my hopes was in a pile / By the door, thoughts would often cry out / Mi amor, adiós, I’m tryna cope / I woke up on the floor” (“Baron”, Navy Blue)
Navy Blue usually outperforms previous versions of himself, but this time, he immediately comes out the gate on fire. I feel like Navy Blue is one of the rare artists where every album in his discography has a convincing case to be someone’s favorite. I know personally, this is now the third year in a row where I thought to myself ‘this is his best work yet’.
James Earl Jones narrates this project with a calm, measured pace, and his voice pierces through the track in a sonorous, authoritative tone. I listened to this project in my room where I have multiple star wars posters. Even though none of them featured a full image of Darth Vader, on “Aegis”, I saw myself weaving through the foggy trees of Dagobah. Parkouring away from a dark shadow of my enemy, running away from myself, as the beat hums through the forest. James Earl Jones calmly adds, “He stormed to the door of his room, and opened it, and went in, and pulled on the light. He turned to the window, and put his hand onto the upper ledge, and lifted it. He felt a cold rush of air laden with snow. The inside of his stomach glowed white hot. With his feet upon the bottom of the ledge, his legs bent under him, his sweaty body shaken by the wind, he looked into the snow and tried to see the ground below, but he could not. Then, he leaped…” As the voices sing, the fog starts to clear, and the X-Wing rises from the swamp.
“Over” with Mike Shabb is also one of my favorite moments on Sir Render , partly because I’ve been craving another Mike Shabb x Navy Blue collab. I remember seeing a YouTube vlog of Shabb in a Montreal studio playing beats for Sage with Nicholas Craven in 2023, and I was amazed. In 2024, Shabb and Sage traded bars on the track “Free Jesus” from Mike Shabb’s Sewaside III , and eventually, I wanted to know how they would sound together with a “shabbvangogh” style production. The “Over” instrumental produced by Mike Shabb brings that vision to life, creating the perfect atmosphere for the both of them to thrive. I can tell, because Navy Blue continues his list of soccer player shoutouts, name-dropping Nicholas Anelka and Zinedine Zidane. If you’ve been listening to Navy Blue for a while, you’ll know Sage loves soccer, and often drops cheeky rhymes referencing a range of players in his raps each season. But if you are also a soccer fan, you’ll know that these are top class players Sage is referring to. We’ve come a long way from Jamie Vardy up in Leicester (from “Post Panic!” on Songs of Sage: Post Panic ). Now, Sage is showing us that he is in peak form, celebrating a league win, and locked in for the World Cup. “On my Nicholas Anelka, out in France, I’m on my Zinedine / Niggas turn to me when they need answers / I grieve my baba on some Black Panther / Every night, I find the light that casts a shadow on my grandeur / Bodies swingin’ in the gallows, walk on water when it’s shallow / Who will lead and who will follow, like Moses with the cattle / Niggas slither, I could hear ‘em rattle” (“Over”, Navy Blue).
Navy Blue’s Sir Render happens to share a release date with the new Vince Staples project, Cry Baby . The latter which is significantly more brazen in its critiques of racism and complicity in America, while both are equally fearless in reclaiming their signature sound, while refining their core strengths (tapping the glass ceiling of the major label system in the process). I like to make this connection because both Navy Blue and Vince Staples dropped their respective independent projects on the same day after they both publicly fell out with their previous label, Def Jam.
In a 2024 written interview with Rolling Stone, Sage talked about how his previous relationship with Def Jam affected the way he created music moving forward:
“I had another album that I’d been working on for the past like, honestly, while I was working on Ways of Knowing . So it’s been two years, almost three, that I’ve been trying to make this other album. So my full attention was on that. It’s always hard for me to create if I’m not thinking about a project, like where is this going to live? So [Memoirs In Armour ] felt a little different. I was having a new experience with how I usually make albums, and it was beautiful because [Memoirs in Armour ] is kind of like the prelude to the album that I eventually want people to hear.”
The day after Sir Render was released, Sage shared on Instagram that the album had been over 5 years in the making, with many different variations in tracklist and sequencing. Now, I cherish the album more knowing how much it means to Sage to finally release Sir Render . I can also start to hear 2022 time capsules from The Alchemist project, This Thing of Ours when I listen to “Belladona” featuring Earl Sweatshirt. And, when I listen to the posthumous Brownsville Ka verse on “Circa”, I feel the presence of excellence as they echo in unison “When you no longer hear me, I’m here / When you no longer hear me, I’m here / When you no longer see me, I’m free / I’m from the field, make use of my shield”
It’s impossible to imagine the unseen, unspoken, pain and suffering that Sage has gone through in the 5 years creating and releasing Sir Render . We know that we lost James Earl Jones and Ka, both of whom played a major role in the life of Sage Elsesser and in the music of Navy Blue. We also know that Navy Blue got dropped from Def Jam after his debut record, and from that pain, brought Memoirs in Armour and The Sword & The Soaring to life. And now, we can finally acknowledge and appreciate Sir Render as the definitive record it was always meant to be.
“My life, my story / My plight, my glory /My knife, my blood / My fight for my love ” (“Bleeding Scarlet”, Navy Blue).
Written by Quincy Davis
