Moses Sumney – “thank u, next” (Ariana Grande Cover)

Eric Gyamfi

Moses Sumney – “thank u, next” (Ariana Grande Cover)

Eric Gyamfi

A few months ago, Moses Sumney released græ, his ambitious and exploratory double album. Today, Sumney has engaged in a different sort of exploration. He’s tried his hand at covering pop overlord Ariana Grande, an artist who has very different methods of searching her interior life.

As The FADER reports, Sumney has covered Grande’s single “thank u, next” for Amazon Music. Though “thank u, next” is less than two years old, it feels like a relic of another geological era. The track was Grande’s first #1 hit, and it represented her most successful take on her own persona, using her tabloid-documented romantic life as a sort of narrative framework. It’s fascinating to hear someone else singing this song, mentioning all of Grande’s various exes by name.

In his cover, Sumney has turned “thank u, next” into a sort of mournful art-soul hymn, singing Grande’s lyrics through layers of robotizing Auto-Tune over a sparse and woozy musical bed. On the indie landscape, Sumney is one of the few vocalists skilled enough to attempt Grande’s flights of melisma. He acquits himself admirably. Listen to Sumney’s cover and revisit Grande’s video below.

græ is out now on Jagjaguwar. If Grande ever decides to pull a folklore, Sumney would be a pretty good collaborator for her.

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