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    "headline": "Navy Blue’s The Sword & The Soaring turns one; the ex-Def Jam rapper has since added a 10th album",
    "description": "Navy Blue released The Sword & The Soaring on November 11, 2025, a 44-minute album with Earl Sweatshirt, then followed it with Sir Render in June 2026.",
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    "keywords": "Def Jam Recordings, Earl Sweatshirt, Freedom Sounds, Navy Blue, Sage Elsesser",
    "articleBody": "Navy Blue’s The Sword & The Soaring turns one today. The rapper, producer and pro skateboarder Sage Elsesser released the 44-minute album on November 11, 2025, his ninth studio record and the second he made after leaving Def Jam. A year on, it already looks like a turning point. The album drew wide critical praise, according to his public biography, and he followed it in June 2026 with another full-length, Sir Render. That makes two albums inside eight months from an artist who once kept three of his records on vinyl only. From Def Jam to doing it alone Elsesser signed with Def Jam in 2023 and released Ways of Knowing that March through his own Freedom Sounds label, under license to the major. A year later he was off the roster. He then recorded Memoirs in Armour in roughly two months and put it out on August 2, 2024. The Sword & The Soaring picked up the same thread. The album’s official streaming description calls his post-Def Jam records more and more autobiographical, and lists songs that move from grief to faith: the somber “Sunlight of the Spirit”, the self-produced “Sharing Life”, “Guardadas” and the closer “The Phoenix”. Orchards, Child Actor and Earl Sweatshirt The lead single, “Orchards”, came with production from Child Actor, the same producer behind his 2024 song “Low Threshold”. In a note shared when the album was announced, Elsesser wrote: “Child Actor has been a guiding light and force for me and my creative process.” He said the beat arrived already titled “Orchard”, and that he pictured an apple orchard stretching toward a single vanishing point before he started writing. The only guest rapper is Earl Sweatshirt, on “24 Gospel”. The pairing goes back a decade. Elsesser handled the art direction for Earl’s 2015 album I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside, appeared on “The Mint” from Earl’s 2018 album Some Rap Songs, and produced two tracks on it. Badiyaa recently looked at Earl Sweatshirt’s “Tabula Rasa” with Armand Hammer, another node in the same New York-and-LA underground network. A busy decade in numbers Count the releases and the pace is striking. Since founding Freedom Sounds on February 4, 2020, Elsesser has put out ten studio albums in about six and a half years, counting the three vinyl-only titles from his 2022 Saga of Sage box set. That is roughly one album every eight months, on top of production for Earl, MIKE, Wiki and Armand Hammer. His beats turn up in surprising places. He produced “Give Me a Call” on Spaceship Symphonies (2020) by Camden Malik, the rapper Badiyaa covered this month when he released 40 Acres, his second album of 2026. He also produced three songs on Armand Hammer’s 2020 album Shrines. Where he stands now Elsesser started out as a skater: he turned pro in 2014 at 17, after a Supreme skate film, and began posting music as Navy Blue on SoundCloud a year later. In 2026 he is one of the most prolific self-released voices in rap, with Sir Render and its single “Ocean Light (Phase 1: Prelude)” as his latest chapter. For anyone who missed it, The Sword & The Soaring is the easiest way in: 44 minutes, one guest, and an artist working through loss on his own label, one year old as of November 11, 2026. Further reading Wikipedia: Sage Elsesser Illustrative image. Image: Philip Halling, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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