Moses Sumney

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Describing its music as ambitious is akin to labeling a stab wound a scrape. If Sumney’s fiery, spiritual 2018 EP Black in Deep Red, 2014 upended fans’ expectations, then Grae is a revelatory shock. Sumney’s music resonates most strongly when—like its lyrics—it destroys pre-established boundaries.