Sumney’s playful, genre-splicing second album showed a man determined to present life in all its richness and contradictionFollow our countdown of the 50 best albums of 2020Moses Sumney’s
music is often two things at once. Intimate yet communal, spiritual yet lustful, his piercingly clear falsetto is interchangeable with a full-throated roar – it all speaks of the tension between the mind and the body, feeling and identity.
The
American songwriter’s delicate first album, Aromanticism (2017), was full of whispered yearning for emotional connection. Its follow-up is more mercurial. As with the fused diphthong of its title, Græ’s two parts, released in February and May, communicate an “inherent multiplicity”, as the author Taiye Selasi says on the track Also Also Also And And And.