Reality Check-In
Chicago rapper shares news ahead of her Coachella appearances
Noname has announced she will be releasing new album Sundial in July. The Chicago rapper shared the news on Sunday, April 9, a week before her first performance at this year’s Coachella on April 16; she’s also set to play the second weekend on April 23.
She made the brief announcement via Instagram, where the only post that currently exists is her announcing the name of the album and the month it will be released in white letters on a black background. She added, “Thank you for everything” with a sun emoji.
The album is the follow-up to 2018’s Room 25. In the interim, she released “Song 31,” “Song 32,” “Häagen Dazs” (a collab with Saba and Smino, which they released as the trio group Ghetto Sage), and launched an online book club in 2019.
In 2021, she talked to Rolling Stone about the progress of her book clubs, which had expanded into racial justice outreach, and her follow-up to Room 25, which was then called Factory Baby (that album was later scrapped). “I’m excited about creating and making art, but it’s coming from a different place,” she said at the time. She said she began making music obsessively after writing and performing poetry in Chicago. “The more I fed into music, the less I cared about poetry,” she added. “Now it’s sort of the same thing, where the more I’m feeding into political education and organizing and the mutual-aid work that we’re doing and just this … whatever this is, I’m starting to be a little less interested in making music.”
In June 2020, released “Song 33” an apparent response to J. Cole’s “Snow on Tha Bluff” but later said she regretted “any further distraction [it] caused on Twitter.” In 2020, she also collaborated with Anderson .Paak on his “Lockdown” remix. Her most recent single is 2021’s “Rainforest.”