The debut album from Moses Sumney is a soulful, cosmic embrace of aloneness. His deep blue songwriting examines the blasé cruelty that defines intimacy in our swipe-left era.   The singular talents of Moses Sumney were already apparent in a couple of early EPs and guest spots with Solange and Sufjan Stevens, but his stellar debut album, Aromanticism, still comes as a slow-motion shock. First of all there is his concept of "aromantic," defined by Sumney as someone incapable of experiencing romantic love, coupled with the struggle to fit into a world where love is almost an imposition and its negation an aberration. Unsurprisingly for an era so obsessed with body politics, most of the commentary surrounding this critically acclaimed album tended to focus on Sumney's manifesto, conveniently ignoring that many before Sumney have been suspicious about the commodification of romance, for instance political art rock bands such as Gang of Four or the whole straight-edge hardcore movement.

 What is different here, and the main reason Aromanticism is such a beguiling record, is the tension between content and form. While the bands mentioned above took pains to create music as unromantic as possible, Sumney's is explicitly sensual, his yearning for detachment as convincing as Al Green's or Maxwell's longing for the polar opposite. Juxtaposition lies at the very fabric of these tracks