Moses Sumney’s “Lonely World” Sounds Anything But

Moses Sumney knows lonely. For the past couple of years, he’s been serenading our alien impulses one track at a time, giving voice to the part of our psyche that would rather burrow inside a tree stump in a forgotten forest than face the outside world. He takes the elastic phrasing of Nina Simone and the purple-black undertones of Nick Drake and invites us to a place of eerie calm. The highwire theatrics of his voice are brought down to the dirt with soothing strums. A foggy echo keeps everything at a distance. His songs sound like lullabies for the self, hymns of fragile persistence.

At first, “Lonely World” seems to fit this pattern. There are the strums, the echo, the hesitant ache. “And the sound of the void flows through your body undestroyed,” he muses, as if he’s the last astronaut looking back at an imploding earth. But suddenly, he’s no longer alone. A bass drum starts to thump on time. Hi-hats flare and flutter. Pointillistic synths and guitars whirl. Thundercat’s bass pushes ahead. Then Sumney’s voice refracts into an endless mirror and starts to chant the word “lonely,” making it sound anything but. Everything crests. The last minute of this song sounds like a coronation, like a kaleidoscope, like a lost Radiohead classic. It is the ecstasy of being alone, rendered by a man who would know.

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