græ

When Moses Sumney first played Daniel Lopatin a demo of græ highlight “Me in 20 Years,” the song was still “wordless,” Sumney tells Apple Music. “Me singing at the top of my lungs and range.” In response, Lopatin told the Ghanaian American singer-songwriter that what he’d just heard “sounded like an old lady screaming to herself in the middle of a Whole Foods,” Sumney says. “I realized then and there that that is my brand.” While the final recording doesn’t quite fit Lopatin’s description, that’s very much the point: Sumney wholeheartedly resists classification, as does græ, a monumental double LP that, as its title suggests, revels in the in-between. Executive produced by Sumney, the project’s influences are as varied as its collaborators—a group that includes Lopatin, John Congleton, YVETTE, Thundercat, James Blake, Tom Gallo, Jill Scott, FKJ, Rob Moose, Ian Chang, Michael Chabon, Michaela Coel, and Adult Jazz. The only constant is Sumney’s voice, an instrument that can change altitude and shape from one moment to the next as it wraps around meditations on gender (“Virile,” “jill/jack”) and identity (“Neither/Nor”), age (“Me in 20 Years”) and intimacy (“Bless Me”). On closer “before you go,” he offers no easy conclusion: “What does love mean?” British American writer Taiye Selasi—who can also be heard speaking to personal multiplicity on “also also also and and and”—says, through a mist of echoing guitars and Sumney’s falsetto. “I don’t know.”