"If you scan through Reddit threads, YouTube comments, and tenth-anniversary retrospectives, you’ll find loose consensus that Marcberg, Marci’s 2010 solo debut, laid the groundwork for much of today’s rap underground. By the late aughts, focus had shifted away from the gritty Golden Era New York sound in favor of animated Atlanta trap and humid Texas funk. Contrary to the zeitgeist, Marcberg traded in frayed, ashen sonics, referencing and updating the bleak winter menace of East Coast classics like Mobb Deep’s Hell on Earth and Big L’s Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous.

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The Long Island rapper-producer’s dusty, claustrophobic sound owed a lot to ’90s forebears like the RZA and 4th Disciple, but it felt more thoughtfully modern than hollow throwback. Marci slowed tempos to a crawl and stripped his samples of anything superfluous—sometimes forgoing drums altogether—and rapped in gravelly, menacing monotone. Arguably, groups like Griselda and the Umbrella Collective, or scenes like the Lynn, Massachusetts universe surrounding Estee Nack and al.divino, wouldn’t exist without the diligent study of his catalog. To hear Marci’s minimalism mimicked by the biggest rapper in the world, a man known for echoing innovations by those levels below, meant Marci had transcended. His latest album, Marciology, is the most overt recognition of his living legend status. The title casts it as a text to pour over: This is Roc Marciano the inimitable auteur, still finding ways to tweak what he’s already perfected."

"History is likely to look kindlier upon Ka than contemporary audiences do. At a time when rap can seem overrun by teenaged goofballs with technicolor dreadlocks—each with their own signature ad-lib—Ka is an anachronism. He’s a 46-year-old New York City firefighter whose intricate lyrics can sound less like rap than arcane incantation. To enjoy his music is to feel like a member of a shrouded and especially dusty religious order; every year or two he emerges from his aerie (okay, it’s a fire station) to deliver an album to be pored over in the darkest hours. With Orpheus vs. the Sirens, he’s added another fascinating chapter to his nighttime grimoire.

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There’s an epic (in the literary sense) quality to Ka’s storytelling. Because he’s decades removed from his roguish childhood, his recounting of Brownsville, Brooklyn has an aged aura—it’s all perspective, no immediacy. His late-life (for a rapper) discography, which began with 2008’s Iron Works, can feel akin to Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”: Every Brownsville moment listeners hear is a small part of a mostly unrecorded story, with Ka doing his best to re-apprehend long-since-faded happiness and ambient, resonant trauma."

"Every beat here is a winner, but the standout is Navy’s crunchy guitar loop on the title track “Post Panic!,” a place where words and music become amorphous. Though Navy is responsible for only five of the project’s 18 beats, they gel seamlessly, much like the beats he produced for As Above So Below, the collaborative album he produced in full for DC rapper ANKHLEJOHN. Song of Sage’s beats breathe and crumble with organic beauty, loops falling off the bone like tender meat.

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Navy Blue has created the best music of his career. Song of Sage: Post Panic! is a raw and assured highlight of the continuously morphing New York underground, recontextualizing an old sound for a younger generation. It narrows the degrees of separation between two generations of NY talent—Navy shouts out Ka on “Breathe,” featuring a showstopping verse from fellow Brooklyn veteran Yasiin Bey—while crowning a new disciple in the process. Above all, though, Navy is committed to the clarity of metamorphosis, recreating himself a little stronger and a little more humble every time"

"Navy’s freewheeling approach to language and narrative shares a lot of tendencies with spoken-word poetry, and there’s a spiritual dimension to his music as well. His debut from last February, Àdá Irin, took its name from a Yoruba term for a sacred tool used by the spirit Ògún and found Navy intent on unearthing inner strength. His latest release, Song of Sage: Post Panic!, picks up where that record left off, providing useful meditations on self-discovery. While it still might be imprecise, you could say Navy Blue makes music for liberation.

 

Consider the standout track “Breathe,” which features one of rap’s spiritual elders Yasiin Bey. The song finds the pair trading existential verses that contemplate the futility of earthly things. The beat, a soulful loop courtesy of the Los Angeles producer Animoss, hypnotizes you until you find yourself in a different state of mind. “Something about the subconscious,” Navy opens. “Why I hold my tongue hostage.” What follows is a stream-of-consciousness treatise. Navy Blue’s greatest appeal might be in how nimbly he navigates the weighty concerns of the self. So much so that listening to “Breathe” feels like watching an athlete achieve some impossible feat of human ingenuity. By the end of his verse, he’s unearthed something true: “Most the trauma tied to my father/Parallels of light shining on me,” he raps. “A knight in shining armor/Ignite the plight and karma.”