The Story
Moses Sumney was born in California to Ghanaian parents and spent part of his childhood in Accra before returning to Southern California as a teenager — a between-worlds upbringing that shows up in music that refuses to sit in one place. His voice, a weightless multi-tracked falsetto, is the instrument everything else orbits.
His 2017 debut Aromanticism, on Jagjaguwar, built an entire album around the idea of lovelessness — not heartbreak but the absence of romantic love as a subject worth taking seriously. It established him as an artist working somewhere between soul, folk, jazz and the avant-garde without committing to any of them.
græ (2020) went bigger and stranger: a double album, released in two parts, about the refusal to be defined — by genre, gender, or category of any kind. Interludes, spoken word and orchestral swells surrounded songs like 'Cut Me' and 'Virile'.
Sumney has since widened into performance and screen work, including an acting role in the HBO series The Idol (2023), and has lent his voice to work by artists from Sufjan Stevens to Solange. The constant is that voice — and a career built on staying uncategorizable.
