Moses Sumney's Moses Sumney's Moses Sumney's Multiplicity

With his sprawling new album, ‘Grae,’ the chameleonic artist demonstrates the joy—and the urgency—of defying labels

- Stephanie Smith-Strickland

If he were a marble-hewn bust, Moses Sumney would be a masterpiece of plurality: bitone eyebrows, a jaunty loc crown, low-cut bleached-blond sides. Yet on this late-February day in Los Angeles, the very human artist is posing, leanly muscled and shirtless, in billowing black pants and an equally inky structural hat he jokingly observes resembles a gele.

His figure contrasts dramatically with the verdant backdrop of stubby lemon and orange trees spaced precisely across the small field behind him. Moments earlier, he and a stylist flirted with the idea of a plumed pirate hat paired with a sheer shirt he described as “a bit too Renaissance fair,” though the accompanying nipple blockers piqued his interest. The deliberations echo Sumney’s high school years, when he was not yet brave enough to sport the goth looks he secretly coveted.

The child of Ghanaian immigrants—who he later learned entered the country without papers—Sumney now resides in Asheville, North Carolina, where, according to the artist, everyone is a bit weird so he fits right in. In 2018 and for a large portion of 2019, he was locked away in isolation (well before it was a transnational requirement) finishing his second album, Grae, half of which appeared early this year. Grae follows the critically acclaimed Aromanticism, released in 2017 while Sumney was still floating on the accolades from his 2016 EP, Lamentations. His 2014 breakout, Mid-City Island, is a bewitchingly nebulous EP created on a four-track cassette recorder gifted to him by Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio.