“I'd rather die than be complacent with the way that it goes,” Oddisee declares on “NNGE,” one of several tracks from his new album that aim to unravel listeners' tightly wound spools of indifference. At 32 years old, the rapper has been working at a steady clip without much fanfare for more than a decade. 2015's  showed his fine-tuned, live-band sound; last year brought the instrumental , which highlighted his beat-making, and the anxiety-laden EP, which foreshadowed . “Lifting Shadows,” a song from that release where the Sudanese-American MC worries that the government might be tapping his phone, feels prescient in the light of recent actions by President Trump: “That's what makes this country great, it's built by those who bleed/It's built by those who came on boats, it's built by those who flee… So if you just try to chop us down you only hurt your knees.”