Noname @ SWG3, Glasgow, 25 Mar

Speakers blast SWG3’s TV Studio with the thumping beat of Frank Ocean’s Nikes. A sweaty crowd sing along, restless for Noname to make her entrance. She actually wasn’t supposed to play here: the Chicago poet was originally booked in for the Warehouse (a much smaller room in the venue) but was bumped up after overwhelming demand. She quickly sold out the new space too. It speaks to a consistent underestimation of the rapper, who’s been outclassing most of her contemporaries since the release of her debut mixtape Telefone in 2016. 

Smoke painted purple by the light of a neon backdrop crawls across the stage, illuminating a lone barstool at the centre. It’s the classic mark of an intimate, low-key set, but when Noname skips onstage with her band and backing singers she makes a point not to sit down, casually flinging her jacket onto the seat before marching to the front brim of the platform. “Has anyone here heard Telefone?” she asks with a knowing smirk, literally jumping for joy when the answer is an unambiguous explosion of yells and shrieks. 

On stage she’s voltaic, surging between the corners of the relatively small space like a chain of lightning. Save for the moments when she spontaneously disappears into the offbeat cast of characters that populate Telefone and last year’s excellent Room 25, her face is glazed with a permanent, gleaming smile. The positivity is magnetic – it’s impossible not to grin like an idiot each time she interrupts a song with an off-the-cuff skit or joke. 

Song 31’s soulful jazz instrumental drapes over her soft, forceful flow like silk as she waxes lyrical about selling out shows without the backing of a label. She tells the screaming crowd to shut up and appreciate her wordplay as she finally takes a seat on the barstool, the lustrous strings of Window reverberating around the room. A post-mortem of a brief, passionate relationship, the song is a whirl of self-love and conflicted affection.

It’s not just Noname’s smooth flow and candid, poetic lyricism that’s gotten her this far: beneath the humour and theatrics lies a force of nature, and in her radiant Glasgow debut she commands attention.