African-American writer and activist Langston Hughes penned these unsentimental lyrics in 1946: “The night for me is not romantic/Unhook the stars and take them down.” On Moses Sumney’s full-length debut, the art-soul singer-songwriter taps into the enduring resonance of Hughes’ blues melancholy. What does it mean to never experience romantic love in a world so structured by the need for it?
Alongside other post-Arthur Russell auteurs like Arca or Perfume Genius, Sumney’s got a jones for drifty, slo-mo songcraft and ambient production. Across a couple of EPs, including last year’s Lamentations, he’s explored these drifting, spare environments while distinguishing himself with his austere guitar arrangements and performances. His tricky harmonic progressions recall Brazilian jazz deities like Gilberto Gil as much as they do the contemporary neo-jazz of Flying Lotus. Sumney’s emotionalism and rapturous crooning also connect him to the legacy of underappreciated post-’90s neo-soul like India.Arie, Lianne La Havas, and Bilal. His hip Los Angeles take on navel-gazing boho blackness makes his music the perfect soundtrack for Issa Rae’s sad-sack HBO comedy series “Insecure” and his 2014 ballad “Plastic,” included on Aromanticism, was once featured on the show. Fused together from disparate stylistic influences, his idiosyncratic sound borrows from the musical style of every decade since the 1970s, but doesn’t seem beholden to any specific one.
The concept of aromanticism—the incapacity or unwillingness to reciprocate romantic feelings or love—runs throughout Sumney’s fragile, existential lyrics: Broken, disappointed, and isolated, Sumney is like Melville’s forlorn Bartleby staring somberly out the window into the void—or, perhaps, a 21st-century version of Tina Turner whispering “What’s love got to do with it?” But he finds radical politics in foreclosing the possibility of finding lasting intimacy and love with a partner. On the burnished “Doomed,” he sings: “If lovelessness is godlessness/Will you cast me to the wayside?” Then there’s the ressentiment of “Indulge Me”: “Nobody troubles my body after/All my old others have found lovers.” In these moments, Sumney is decidedly more downer Friedrich Nietzsche than liberationist James Baldwin.
Sumney’s cosmic embrace of aloneness and dissociation—his nihilismus, to borrow a phrase from writer and poet Amiri Baraka—has particular resonance in our current cultural moment in which the leader of the so-called free world sees no problem in putting down black men for protesting their own derogation. Sumney has no patience for the façade of respectability politics or knee-jerk uplift narratives. You won’t find kumbayas on the inconsolable “Don’t Bother Calling,” and there’s no Hollywood ending on “Quarrel,” where attraction between partners of unequal backgrounds only results in incongruity: “We cannot be lovers/Long as I’m the other.”
Sumney’s deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines our swipe-left era. It also reminds us how much same-sex marriage battles have managed to reshift millennials’ interest in normalcy and the pursuit of intimacy in the age of Tinder. Does love need to be desired, much less found? Sumney’s music is woeful, but it’s still erotic and sexy: libidinous tryst-song “Make Out in My Car,” replete with jazz flute, repeats the hook: “I’m not tryna go to bed with you/I just wanna make out in my car.” Aromanticism envisions a loveless universe by way of sensuous musicianship: I suspect some couples will probably fall deeper in love while bumping and grinding to these songs. The exquisite production is atmospheric and bold: There’s lots of negative space, and you can’t help but dig the dreamlike harmonies and the curiously-EQ’d neo-classical strings. And Sumney’s gossamer falsetto, equal parts Smokey Robinson and Thom Yorke, is the album’s fertile throughline. Aromanticism’s quietude and calm sensitivity deliver a musical detoxification from the exhausting stream of information that now constitutes a normal day of news.
“Can I tell you a secret,” Sumney coos on “Plastic,” stretching his voice over a moment of musical silence. Aromanticism wins points for delivering intense, raw feeling in a global moment defined by sinister cruelty and the ongoing repression of black bodies. If there’s a critique to be made of this collection of songs, it’s that Sumney doesn’t summon the fierce wit and ebullient humanism of some of the classic-era jazz he musically draws from (think: Andy Razaf, Billy Strayhorn, or Fran Landesman). The album caters to pessimists who argue that our culture’s brain-dead emphasis on romance and love distracts from the inevitability of racial and class power struggle. It might confound others who don’t think the pursuit of those things is necessarily diametrically opposed. Frantz Fanon, the greatest writer on colonial politics and colonial love in the 20th century, was also a skeptic, not unlike Sumney: “Oh my body,” he famously wrote in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, “always make me a man who questions.” But Fanon believed that romantic love was possible—that, above all else, was why love was worthy of critique and dismantling. Sumney, for his part, seems to have gone down a different path: diving into the bleak void in search of answers, giving us sumptuous music along the way.
