Moses Sumney, the electro-soul singer who stunned us with last year’s Aromanticism, has announced a new EP, Black In Deep Red, 2014, which represents a departure from the artist’s soothing, intimate work of yore. Angrier and more bombastic, the EP includes samples from a protest rally over the death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown.
The three-track EP is due out next Friday, August 10th via Jagjaguwar., but Sumney has shared the release’s closing track, “Rank & File”. Bass-heavy and riddled with anxious, chittering finger snaps, the song evokes militaristic chants both structurally and lyrically (“Now I don’t care, but I’ve been told,” he sings). A fierce, straightforward protest song, it finds Sumney directly addressing our culture’s trigger-happy police force: “Their governing master/ To their hip is plastered/ Say protect and serve us/ But murder’s not service.”
Sumney’s released an accompanying video for the song, which finds a plastic soldier melting against a blood red background. Check it out below.
In a statement, Sumney had this to say about the record:
“Black in Deep Red, 2014 was ignited by the first and last time I attended a protest. It was in the fall of 2014, after a grand jury decided not to charge the offending officer in the Mike Brown murder, delivering the verdict just in time for them to get home for Thanksgiving.
I felt like a camouflaged outsider at the protest, like an anthropologist performing a study amongst his own kind. I took to the mountains soon after that and wrote these songs, wondering if power was a transferable device that could change hands through the vocalizing of unrest.
The EP’s title is inspired by a 1957 Mark Rothko painting by the same name.”
Black In Deep Red, 2014 Artwork:
Black In Deep Red, 2014 Tracklist:
01. Power?
02. Call-To-Arms
03. Rank & File
