On a nippy, drizzly February afternoon in Brooklyn, Moses Sumney is trying to track down some glasses he lost across town. Using an app, he is attempting to convince a stranger named Frank to deliver them to him. It is distracting him. Every time his phone buzzes, he is hoping it’s a status report. “I just want to know if he’s actually doing it, or if I have to do it myself – like everything else!” he blurts out, the last three words crescendoing theatrically. His comment is telling: for the last several years, the 28-year-old singer-songwriter and polymath has become used to doing it all.
Sumney is preparing to release his highly anticipated second album, græ, which will complete his evolution from highly publicised indie prospect to singular musical frontiersman. His songs actively defy classification, pushing the boundaries of soul, jazz and alt-rock, while maximising a bewitching voice. His debut album, 2017’s Aromanticism, an inquisitive reimagining of what lovelessness can mean, was hailed by critics as one of the year’s best; græ takes things further, offering up Sumney’s most immersive music yet. It is also his most uncompromising work, not a double album but one album split in half, each comprising boundary-pushing sounds that exist in the margins.
As a person, and as a presence, Sumney is the opposite. Tall and chic, he stands out at all times. Today, he is wearing a clear black tank top under a black army jacket, a trenchcoat wrapped round his shoulders. As we take seats for our interview in a nondescript studio office, he quips that the ambience makes it feel like a deposition. He offers to take off the shades hiding his eyes but would rather wear them. He does a lot of gesturing with his hands, which are adorned with gold rings. He speaks clearly and carefully at all times, as if used to being misunderstood.
A few nights previously, Sumney made his late-night TV debut on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Surrounded by a 10-piece orchestra beneath mood lighting, he delivered a gripping performance of his latest single, Cut Me; the studio crowd, at first unsure what to expect, were won over by his penetrating falsetto. When he shuffled off stage, Colbert couldn’t help but exclaim: “My son played [Sumney] for me and I thought: What is that voice?!”
Sumney was born in San Bernardino, California, and spent most of his childhood there. The son of Ghanaian pastors, he never felt constricted by organised religion but found a sense of spirituality that informs the songs he makes. When Sumney was 10, the family moved back to Ghana, and he struggled with the transition. “I basically didn’t do well on any front: socially, academically, spiritually, emotionally, physically,” he says. “It’s a tough time to just transition to this entirely different sort of way of life, especially because children are demonic.” Growing up across two drastically different cultures divided the ways in which he self-identified. “One of the many things that inspired this album was the realisation that this shift created a sort of statelessness in me,” Sumney says. “When I’m in America, I’m the African in America; when I’m in Africa I’m the American in Africa. So your relationship with a national identity is inherently fractured.”
After listening exclusively to country music for the first 10 years of his life, he found his calling as a singer, but his parents objected. Sumney chose to develop his skills clandestinely. He started writing his first songs when he was 12, on the school bus and in class (“My grades were terrible”), learning to play guitar from YouTube videos and hiding his songbook under his mattress. He didn’t sing publicly until he was a teenager, when his family returned to California and he joined the high-school choir. Throughout the interview Sumney takes himself very seriously, and it is easy to see why: without any external support for his dream, the only way to see it through was with the fuel of extreme self-belief.
At university in California, Sumney studied creative writing with a focus on poetry, a ruse to throw his parents off the music scent. “I could kind of get away with saying I was getting an English degree because my mom was like: ‘Well, you can still be a lawyer,’” he laughs. While there, he honed his musicianship. “I begged the jazz kids at the cafe on campus to play with me,” he says. He worked more diligently at the guitar, using a loop pedal so he could be self-sufficient. He learned to do it all.
Things moved quickly from there. When Sumney released his first EP, Mid-City Island, in 2014, he almost immediately became an indie sensation: playing sold-out shows, opening for Sufjan Stevens, befriending Solange Knowles (he later sang back-up on her song Mad). His haunting, reverbed folk songs quickly enchanted the music scene in a city full of people chasing their big breaks. “I was being wined and dined fantastically by record labels and lawyers and A&R people and publishing people, and I would take every meeting because I had no food.”
However, Sumney “made the active decision not to sign a record deal, because I wanted creative control”. He had a day job for a while, running social media for a pizza chain (“My wages were shit, but I got free pizza”). Soon, he realised his larger musical vision was paying the price. “I was getting quite comfortable. That’s when I was like: no, I just have to suffer.” He left not long after, and it was the last job he worked. He put all of his effort into his music, resulting in 2016’s Lamentations, an EP of intimate soul hymnals constructed round lightly fingered riffs. He finally signed with a label, Terrible Records, co-founded by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and did shows with art-rock band Dirty Projectors.
Sumney’s sound is always shifting, and there has been some debate over where to place his music along the spectrum. It is his supernal voice that disarms listeners, that sends a tingle down the spine, but more than anything else his music is defined by its unwillingness to be categorised. As a black musician performing in many predominantly white spaces, Sumney often, wrongly, gets classified as R&B, which he rejects. “I definitely rage against that,” he says. “I have done so, so much and it still happens. My music is just not R&B music, and that’s fine. I love R&B and I think there are elements of it in the music, and on this record I went even closer to it than I have in the past. But it’s very obviously racist when people call me an R&B act.”
His work, he says, is difficult to define because it’s “all over the place. When something exists that cannot so easily be categorised, people will still try to categorise it. That practice is a deep cultural flaw.” He adds, somewhat flippantly, reclining in a chair that isn’t built for it: “I don’t really care any more what people need to say in order to define me. Because the definition isn’t for me – it’s about me, but it’s for them. It’s for their understanding.” (For what it’s worth, he defines his sound as “an amalgamation of soul, jazz, folk and experimental indie rock”.)
This blurring of borders also extends into how he thinks about creating. His debut album Aromanticism, which he dubbed “lovelessness as a sonic dreamscape”, was a blatant pivot away from traditional songcraft about romantic love. In a 2017 Tumblr post, Sumney explained that the concept album sought to interrogate the idea that romance – as personified by a destined companionship or inevitable coexistence – is necessary. Instead of ballads, he sang about the absence of intimacy. The songs aren’t about seeking closeness but about feeling an irreconcilable distance, as demonstrated by one poignant lyric on Doomed: “Am I vital / If my heart is idle?”
Græ is even less conventional in nature. The album, which Sumney worked on with musicians such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Thundercat and Adult Jazz, explores displacement from absolutes. Voiceover work from writers Taiye Selasi and Michael Chabon and actors Ezra Miller and Michaela Coel directs the experience. “Greyness is a metaphor for being in between extremes, to having an identity on any scale – whether it be sonic or romantic or national – that is neither one thing nor the other. I wanted to really claim that space and name that space. It’s the void. It’s nothingness. And nothingness, to me, is not just an absence; it’s its own presence.”
This compulsion to wade through grey areas is “inherent to me”, Sumney says. “It’s not really something I have to try to do; it’s my experience. But I also consider myself a little bit of a social scientist in a way. One of the many things I would have loved to study further is sociology: the relationship between sociology and the personal, and how we internalise our socialisation.”
It has been more than an hour now and Moses Sumney still hasn’t received confirmation on the status of his forgotten specs. “When’s my friend going to bring my glasses?” he jokingly sings in a playful cadence. Before he can get an answer, members of his team come rushing in to whisk him away into the photoshoot he is already behind schedule for. He sings his response, with the bravado of someone in a Broadway musical: “Here I come!”
And then he vanishes, his black coat whizzing behind him.
Moses Sumney’s græ: Part 1 is out now, with Part 2 out on 15 May
