Description
Label Review.
2017 album.
Our Overview.
Los Angeles based artist Moses Sumney has the kind of voice that makes the chest tighten. Its tones are intoxicating and brim with emotion in the spaces where his notes linger. Pitchfork recently described Sumney’s sound as “soul-inflected electro-folk”, and that’s a tag Sumney can live with, “it’s totally better than what I usually get” says Moses. Suspicious of the trigger-happy desire to file artists away, Sumney is vocal about the ways it hurts black artists who don't conform to genre conventions. Still, like Eska, Sumney is focused on his music first and foremost, confounding social expectations is an important but secondary concern. He’s by no means complacent, appreciating the necessity for healthy column inches as his star ascends further, “at the end of the day it’s nice to be written about”.
Sumney is uncompromising in his ethos as an artist, self-writing and co-producing all of his work thus far. Moses explains ‘Aromanticism’ his first full length album, was “Written in Montreal, Los Angeles, Asheville, Topanga, Laguna, Big Bear, coastal Nicaragua, and on a sleepy ship traversing the Pacific ocean, making ‘Aromanticism’ was a 3-year adventure into the parts of the self that society encourages us to silence for the sake of our sanity.
“The album title was chosen before any of its songs were written. The not-yet-in-the-dictionary definition of an ‘aromantic’ is simply someone who doesn’t completely feel romantic attraction. I’m just trying to get it out from over the red squiggly line.
“‘Aromanticism’ features performances and production contributions from Matt Otto (Majical Cloudz), Thundercat, Joshua Willing Halpern, Paris Strother (KING), Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Rob Moose, Ian Chang (Son Lux), Tosin Abasi (Animals As Leaders), Nicole Miglis (Hundred Waters), Ludwig Görannson, Cam Obi and more. All of the lyrics and vocal arrangements were written by me. Genre is shirked while choir-inspired vocal layering is employed in order to explore the multiplicities that are contained within a single person.”