With Please Have a Seat, Nnamdï discovers the unexpected delights and anxieties of staying still

Nnamdï’s sixth and latest album, Please Have a Seat (Secretly Canadian/Sooper), begins and ends with versions of the same refrain: “Some days I wake up ready to run.” Sure enough, since moving to Chicago from the suburbs a decade ago, the inexhaustible artist has essentially operated at a dead sprint. He records prolifically. He co-owns Sooper Records (with Sen Morimoto and Glenn Curran). He sings, he raps, and he plays guitar, bass, and drums, contributing nearly all the instrumental parts to his albums.

That said, Please Have a Seat sounds like the work of someone who’s stepped off the hamster wheel, however briefly, to wonder why he spent so much time running in the first place. Nnamdï dials down the goofy wordplay and madcap energy of albums past, though they’re far from gone—and another Nnamdï calling card, wholesale stylistic shifts within a song, continue to abound throughout. He’s at his blithe, bounceable best on “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous,” divulging quarter-life anxieties in the process. However, a line in the earlier song “Armoire” (barely snatchable in its galloping bars) might be the album’s most telling: “I used to dream I could have everything / I can finally see / That I already did.”

As a nod to those early days, his Please Have a Seat release show on October 7 turned the House of Vans into “Nnamdï’s Pancake Haus,” a big-boy version of the DIY venue he and his brother Alfred ran out of their suburban family home. (Meanwhile, his sister Kenechi is cited as a sampled voice on “Grounded.”) This headlining show at Metro is part of a fall tour with back-to-back legs in North America and Europe; Nnamdï will be supported by rapper Joshua Virtue, part of the Why? Records creative constellation.

Nnamdï Joshua Virtue and Moontype open. Sat 10/22, 9 PM, Metro, 3730 N. Clark, $25, $22 in advance, 18+

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