græ

græ finds him trying to be, well, everything, and through a convergence of folk, jazz, classical, and art-rock, along with his probing lyricism, Sumney has managed to produce a sonic marvel

Equal parts elegant and antagonistic, it comes together to be every part the listening experience that he wanted it to be - complex, unconventional and ultimately, essential.

Grӕ is so rich in content and so vast in musicality it would be impossible to unpack everything in a single review. It is complex yet universal – comforting yet unsettling. It lives in an incorporeal realm of its own, and somehow, Sumney has gained complete and utter command over it.

Græ is, in summary, a quite astonishing achievement. You won’t hear anything else like it this year. You won’t hear a more extravagantly astonishing voice this century.

Just as he offers the deepest introspection lyrically, so this album merits the same level of attention. It needs a listener’s focus to revel and delight in every one of it nuances. Put your headphones on, lock the door and slip into his world—you will be rewarded.

He’s created, with grae, an album that demands you to look at it, and him, in totality. It is shapeless yet massive, a sprawling interrogation of who created the margins of normalcy, and whether one can reclaim their agency back from systems that have existed longer than they have.

This intense experience of Sumney’s romanticism signs itself as his most mature, convincing, and dynamic piece of work to date. Compared to his lauded debut LP, here Sumney has produced a grittier, more complex listening experience underlined by improved production, well-rounded hooks, consuming vocal deliveries, and exploratory rhythmics.

Scored by Sumney’s most vibrant array of instrumentals to date, the San Bernardino musician’s second set sees him push outward, swapping Aromanticism’s insular fragments for a set of more exposed, yet transient brushstrokes.

Perhaps the only thing more exciting than græ will be seeing where Moses Sumney goes from here.

The sprawling second album from the crystal-voiced singer-songwriter is a riot of moods. Moses Sumney widens the scope of his work and takes full account of his self, warts and all.

For all of the purposefully oblique subject matter, the album never once feels indirect or opaque, instead grounding the concepts of difference and performance in the familiar gestures that serve to make the most familiar behaviorisms suddenly alien and strangely devoid of the innate logic we—in our day to day haste—ascribe to them.

Though Sumney’s fears of solitude still define much of the album, his embrace of the spaces between binaries opens up new possibilities for self-definition and actualization, and the album suggests that the artist might be rising out of the shadows he explores so tenderly.

On Sumney’s arresting and remarkable new double-album græ, he now challenges the idea of us as standardised, binary beings.