Review: Room 25

In her debut studio album, Noname welcomes you back, catches you up

In the opening bars of her debut studio album, Noname wonders what the listener will be doing as they listen. She raps, “Maybe this the album you listen to in your car / When you driving home late at night / Really questioning every god, religion, Kanye, bitches,” her first lyrics in two years.  

This album, as she announces in the first verse of “Self,” is for her, and she makes sure that her voice and manner of storytelling are apparent in every line. Her debut mixtape, Telefone, was released in 2016 to critical acclaim. The continued popularity of that 30-minute compilation brought her two years of touring and a move to Los Angeles from her hometown of Chicago. 

In her writing Noname is, at once and consistently, personal and far-reaching. Her early career as a spoken word artist is apparent in both her lyrics and their delivery. She manages to capture an important element of spoken word: she makes her lived experiences accessible without seeking to make blanket statements about how everyone might see the world. Instead, Noname shares her observations, talks about what’s changed in her life, and shapes her identity in a melodious tone that makes her music feel as though she’s talking to you as a close friend.   

The content and production of Room 25 are darker than Noname’s previous release, Telefone. There, the sound marked a bubblier, more youthful period of her life. But Room 25 still paints experiences from both ends of an emotional spectrum between pain and joy. Whether she’s contemplating how the current state of the American government is keeping her up at night in “Blaxploitation,” or fantasizing about a quiet day spent in Jamaica with a lover in “Montego Bae,” she’s a storyteller whose practiced, quiet craft is fatal. Her flow is conversational and casual, contrasting her densely packed rhymes that fit 11 songs into a 34-minute record. She maps a syncopated scheme, and her bars can be surprising to a first-time listener due to her tendency to rap to the melody rather than the drum beat. 

This characteristic of Noname’s music, while making her flow unique, takes on a different quality in “Prayer Song.” In the second verse both the beat and her rapping seem to speed up, though this is only an effect of her delivery—she takes longer pauses between bars as though she’s run out of breath, her voice having tried to outrun the rhythm by the end of the song. When the beat catches up to her, she raps to it rather than the melody. The darkness of her lyrics is highlighted as the cymbals start to fade out, leaving the moment with lyrical meaning, alone.  

Room 25 is like catching up with a friend. Each song recalls a different part of Noname’s life over the past few years since Telefone: her move to LA, her recent success in the industry, and a torrid, tumultuous relationship create a narrative of her life since her last release. On the day of Room 25’s release, Rolling Stone declared Noname one of the best rappers alive. At only 25 years of age, it may be a burdensome title to live up to. Noname herself admitted in the aforementioned article that she worried her previous success with Telefone was a fluke. However, she manages to maintain her quiet confidence and her clever, wry sense of humour in this release. In “Self,” she rhetorically asks: “Y’all really thought a bitch couldn’t rap huh?” 

A few days after the release of Room 25, Noname announced a 2019 tour. She will be performing at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on January 3.