“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time,” the composer John Cage once wrote. “There is always something to see, something to hear.” Is it possible that Fatimah Warner—the 27-year-old Chicago rapper and poet who performs as Noname—meditated on these words while crafting her first proper album, Room 25? Packing a density of ideas into a sleek 34-minute package, the album seems to exist as a repudiation to emptiness. Noname flits from subject to subject, often within the space of a single couplet, and her rich tumble of language avoids the temptation to impose order on political anxiety, sexual vulnerability, or the awkwardness and the sadness that come with growing up. Our brains are conditioned to shutter these things off into discreet hierarchies, but Room 25 arrives as a kind of re-conditioning, an affirmation that all of these things matter, that everything we come across is to the point. If the album is about any one thing, perhaps the critic Briana Younger is right that it’s about coming of age; another way to look at it is that it’s about intersectionality, the overlap of lived realizations. Shunning the nihilism that’s long been hardwired into hip-hop—whether in Wu Tang Clan’s violent fatalism or in Run the Jewels’ embrace of the abyss—Noname’s music doesn’t abide the possibility of meaninglessness. What she does is closer to Outkast’s elevation of black eccentricity, or Beastie Boys’ pan-cultural interconnectedness: She invests everything with the weight of significance, and in doing so reckons joyfully even with fear and trauma, allowing that life as a young black woman is painful but never conceding that it’s senseless. Her album is—to borrow one of her own phrases—“a remedy for nothingness.”

Room 25’s posture of meaningfulness extends even to its purposeful embrace of hip-hop heritage. Noname made the album with producer Phoelix, and together they offer a more robust and varied update on the airy sounds of the Telefone mixtape. Reductive though it may be to liken her to one of the year’s other dynamic ladies of rap, it’s illuminating to consider how Noname’s approach coincides with Cardi B’s; both of them bring unique vision and personality to traditionist hip-hop sensibilities, but where Cardi B’s scaffolding is the big blockbuster rap albums of the early 00s, Noname roots herself in the analog allure of the Soulquarians—think Mama’s Gun or Things Fall Apart. (It’s telling that she name-drops D’Angelo on “Don’t Forget About Me.”) There are subtle psychedelics swirling around the edges of these songs—listen to the orchestral billow that lifts “Window,” or to the flutter of strings that caresses “Regal”—yet there’s nothing flashy or ostentatious about these tracks, most of them built on live band interplay. “Blaxploitation” lives up to its name without any need for horns or congas or chicken-scratch guitar; it’s plenty evocative with just a sleek undercurrent of fat bass, adding up to two tight minutes of low-end theorizing. “Don’t Forget About Me” sounds earthy and moth-eaten with its organ hum and slow handclap percussion, while “Montego Bae” navigates rhythmic twists and turns with the finesse of a samba (or at least Mos Def’s “Casa Bey”). When Noname does engage modern tropes, it’s not through the trap beats of Migos, but rather through the glossy keyboard tones and church-choir harmonies of Chance the Rapper, with whom she’s collaborated repeatedly; consider the glossy fade-in of “Self” or the spacy jazz of “With You.” The record’s lived-in sound is endlessly appealing, but also thematic: What it suggests is that, even as Noname testifies to the joys and sorrows of making her way in the world, she knows she’s walking a trail that’s been well-trod before.

Noname was a poet before she became an MC, and her performances sparkle with crisp enunciation and linguistic invention. She values verbal precision enough that, when she can’t locate a word for the existential dread that keeps black people awake at night, she coins her own (“I’m struggling to simmer down/ maybe I’m an insomni-black”). Such dread darkens the edges of this colorful album, as on “Prayer Song,” where skeletons still rattle in America’s closets: “I was lost but thinking I was truly free/ Darkness lingers in the wake of slavery/ Hold me close, don’t let me fall into the deep.” Ephemerality is an ongoing worry, too. “I know my body’s fragile, know it’s made from clay,” she raps in “Don’t Forget About Me,” but the fear that keeps her up at night isn’t just death—it’s oblivion. Room 25 feels haunted by the ghosts of black people whose bodies were transmuted into gold and tobacco and cotton; and by the women whose testimonies to abuse and injustice have been swept into silence. These are two different kinds of negation, but Room 25 is the portrait of a young artist who chooses joy over abyss. On the brink of erasure, she revels in her own tongue-twisting dexterity, delighting in the sparks that fly as syllables collide (“Penny proud, penny petty pissing off Betty the Boop”). She has sex for the first time, and recounts it with giddy earnestness (“fuckin’ is fantastic”). She does work that she’s proud of (Telefone “saves lives,” we’re told, believably), but turns on a dime to deflate her own self-mythology (“the secret is, I’m actually broken”). And she savors friendship, as on “Ace,” a posse cut with Smino and Saba, one of the gentlest chest-thumps you’ll ever hear (“the radio niggas sound like they wearing adult diapers,” Noname boasts, but mere seconds later she’s moved on to the virtues in vegan cuisine). There is no empty space or empty time on this record; nothing in its web of meaning that scans as cursory or superfluous. “Don’t forget about me,” one song says, and those words hang over the entire record: A remedy for nothingness; an erasure resistance plan.