74 THE NEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
singing over ethereal guitar loops. Au-
diences quickly recognized that there
was something special about his voice;
he just needed to figure out how to
use it. Dave Sitek, best known for his
work with the post-punk group TV
on the Radio, lent him a four-track re-
corder. Sumney’s first few singles were
folky and stripped down. He collabo-
rated with artists like Beck and So-
lange, and opened for Sufjan Stevens
and James Blake, while deciding what
to do for himself.
Sumney’s early recordings had a
withdrawn, almost shy quality, as he
tried to make his singing blend in with
pretty strums and delicate, lo-fi sound
collages. But, as his songs grew more
sophisticated, he began exploring the
full range of his voice. Sometimes this
meant holding back, calling to mind the
quiet, frisky moments of Amy Wine-
house. Other times, his voice was bold
and restless, almost overpowering the
track. Sumney can be reminiscent of
Björk: you hear a song and imagine
that a less interesting singer might have
turned it into an easy hit, rather than a
performance that is uniquely the art-
ist’s own.
“græ” ’s resistance to closure is al-
most literal: although its first half was
released online in February, the rest of
it, as well as the physical version, isn’t
coming out until May. Among the forty-
odd contributors to “græ,” the most prom-
inent is the experimental electronic mu-
sician Daniel Lopatin. Lopatin, who
also records as Oneohtrix Point Never,
is a master at evoking the feeling of the
present: a seamless seesaw between anx-
ious dread and ecstatic bliss. He and
Sumney are like sparring partners, test-
ing each other’s capacity to match qua-
vering falsetto with machine growls,
playful rudeness with New Age synths.
Sumney seems less forlorn this time,
as he invites others to help navigate
these swirls of sound.
The seriousness and the self-pos-
session that define Sumney’s work make
it easy to miss out on moments of
humor. His singing sounds epic and
timeless, and then you listen closely
and hear a reference to the fantasy se-
ries “Animorphs,” or a question about
whether he’s merely someone’s “Fri-
day dick.” On “Two Dogs,” a willowy
track that will be released in May, he
describes a dog that’s “whiter than a
health-food store.” That these songs
are often about loneliness lends the
quiet invitation to cross lines a kind of
awkward mischievousness. “Sometimes
I want to kiss my friends,” he sings on
the lush, tiptoeing “In Bloom.” “You
don’t want that, do ya? / You just want
someone to listen to ya / Who ain’t tryna
screw ya.”
In December, Sumney released a
video for “Polly,” a gorgeous, lilting
guitar ballad about a relationship at
an impasse. Sumney looks directly at
the camera for the song’s duration. As
the lyrics appear onscreen, he cries and
cries. It’s both hard to watch and im-
possible not to. It’s also impossible to
understand what he is feeling in that
moment—which is why all I could do
was laugh. His singing is absorbing and
sensual, drawing you past the words,
which will never suffice anyway, to-
ward something deeper.
“græ” begins with a meditation on
the relationship between the words
“isolation” and “island.” Throughout,
there are spoken segments in praise
of multiplicity and knowing oneself,
and riffs railing against society’s pen-
chant for classification. Perhaps this is
the fate of knowing yourself too well—
you may always be misunderstood. On
“Me in 20 Years,” Sumney addresses
a fortysomething version of himself,
wondering what the future holds and
whether the “imprint in my bed” re-
mains. On “Gagarin,” he sounds like a
muffled lounge singer, wishing to “ded-
icate my life / My life to something big-
ger / Something bigger than me.” For
now, Sumney’s songs feel like a bil-
lowy shelter, “a space inside which you
can exist.” Sometimes he sounds like
a man, other times like a woman, and
then you realize that it’s not so much
the distinction that matters as how
one makes a home of one’s choosing in
that space. Resisting binaries or expec-
tations isn’t just about negation. Gray
isn’t just a halfway point between black
and white. It is its own shade, its own
color, its own world of possibilities.
1
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