MOSES SUMNEY Cry Freedom
When the second half of Moses Sumney’s double album grae was released during quarantine and quickly proclaimed a masterpiece by music critics, the 29-year-old was suspect. The 20-track album on the Jagjaguwar label explores the concept of “greyness,” that liminal space between absolutes such as black or white, American or African, R&B or indie, masculine or feminine—through genre-bending songs expertly woven with interviews, voice memos, and ambient sounds. The album was dense and sprawling enough that Sumney opted to split the record into two, releasing one half in February, and the next, three months later.
“I wanted people to sit with the lyrics, and the songs. The words really inform these songs, and it’s rare that you get listeners that really dive deep into the work,” Sumney says to me via a Zoom screen, from his home in Asheville, North Carolina. The unforeseen lockdown affords listeners time while the current cultural reckoning is the perfect foreground and impetus to engage with the music in a more meaningful way. Grae is more than an hour in length and quite impossible to digest in one sitting. “Virile,” “Polly,” and “Me in 20 Years” are easy favorites, whilst “Two Dogs” and “Bystanders”—with themes of race and authorship respectively—compel you to listen closer. But there are tracks that can be off-putting sonically or otherwise, and only pay dividends for the most dedicated listener, willing to do the work. “I am very disturbed when an album comes out and the next week people have an opinion on it,” Sumney muses. “Because this record takes a long time to really understand and get into, and a lot of these songs, to even like them; and I’m fully aware of that because that’s how I create.”
At the end of the press tour for his critically acclaimed 2017 debut full-length, , he felt that he had talked himself into a corner. “ is a concept album about lovelessness as a sonic dreamscape,” he had stated in an early blog post. Having to explain “aromanticism”—that inability to feel romantic attraction, an “ism” not yet entered into Webster’s dictionary—repeatedly, eventually rendered it hollow and felt untrue to Sumney’s identity. He wasn’t proclaiming that he was incapable of he was trying to show another way—that being alone didn’t have to be a disaster. Nonetheless, with his next album, he wanted to talk about romance in less binary ways as his own journey has been about seeking out these in-between spaces, defining it as “greyness,” learning to thrive there and then celebrating it so that others might too.
