Moses Sumney / Aromanticism / 2017
Indulge Me
wistful, guarded, quietly aching
A brief, almost ceremonial song built from a single repeated plea and a terse verse about romantic isolation. Moses Sumney uses scarcity of language to mirror the subject's own emotional scarcity, turning a short lyric into an exercise in restraint and longing.
romantic isolation self-sufficiency vs. loneliness asexuality/aromanticism ritual and repetition bodily autonomy
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses an unnamed other (or the listener), asking to be humored or indulged. The voice is composed but carries an undertone of defensiveness, as though admitting vulnerability only through a request rather than a confession.
What happens
The song doesn't progress through events so much as circle a static emotional position. It opens and closes with the same plea, bookending a short middle section that explains, almost reluctantly, why the speaker is in this state: former partners have moved on, the speaker remains untouched and self-contained. There's no resolution, only a return to the opening request, suggesting the condition described is ongoing rather than a moment to be escaped.
How it's built
The song is built asymmetrically: a two-line repeated refrain frames a single, denser verse, then returns to the refrain to close. There's no chorus-verse-chorus pop structure here; instead it resembles a plainchant or incantation, with the title phrase functioning as both opening invocation and closing return. The brevity itself is structural -- the song refuses to expand past a minute or two, embodying the guardedness it describes.
Section by section
Opening refrain
“Indulge me”
The song begins with a request rather than a statement, immediately establishing a dynamic of asking permission to be heard or tolerated. Its bareness sets the tone of minimalism that persists throughout.
Verse
“Dead Sea as barren as a stutter”
This image links physical emptiness with disrupted speech, as if the speaker's capacity for connection and self-expression have both run dry. The comparison suggests that desolation isn't just external but affects the ability to communicate feeling.
Verse
“Nobody troubles my body after”
This line reframes isolation as a kind of protection rather than pure loss. The body remains undisturbed, which could read as peace or as numbness -- the ambiguity is central to the song's emotional complexity.
Verse closing
“All my old others have found lovers”
By inverting the opening line's wording, the verse creates a sense of closure that feels hollow rather than satisfying -- a loop rather than a resolution, reinforcing the static, unresolved mood of the song.
Closing refrain
The return to the opening plea without further explanation suggests the speaker's situation hasn't changed; the indulgence requested at the start is still being requested at the end, implying a cyclical, unresolved emotional state.
Craft
- chiasmus
- The verse flips its own phrasing from one ordering of 'lovers' and 'others' to its reverse, mirroring the symmetry of loss -- both parties have moved on equally, and the grammatical inversion reinforces the sense of a closed loop.
- repetition/refrain
- The title phrase recurs insistently, functioning less as a lyric line and more as a ritual request, almost liturgical in its persistence.
- imagery of dryness
- Reference to a barren sea and a stutter evokes depletion and blocked expression, linking emotional drought to a kind of speechlessness.
- synesthesia
- Describing laughter as colored blends sound and sight, suggesting a memory that's vivid but also distorted or unreal, like something recalled rather than lived.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading ties this song to the album's larger exploration of aromanticism and chosen solitude -- the speaker isn't necessarily mourning loss but acknowledging a different relationship to intimacy, one where being left alone is neither purely tragic nor purely liberating. An alternative reading sees it as a more conventional breakup song, where the plea to be indulged is a thinly veiled request for patience or tolerance while healing from heartbreak. The song's brevity and lack of clear resolution make both readings viable, and Sumney doesn't signal strongly which is correct.
Context
This song appears on Aromanticism, an album widely understood as an exploration of romantic disconnection and the experience of existing outside conventional narratives of love and desire. Sumney has spoken in interviews (not directly quoted here) about using the album to interrogate the assumption that romantic love is universally necessary, and this track's compressed, incantatory form fits that larger project of resisting typical pop structures around love songs.
Listen for
- the starkness of the arrangement, which leaves the voice exposed
- the way the refrain functions almost like a mantra rather than a hook
- the chiastic reversal in the verse's final line
- the tension between the speaker's composed delivery and the loneliness being described
About Moses Sumney
Moses Sumney is an American singer-songwriter and actor. His self-recorded EP, Mid-City Island, was released in 2014.
b. 1991 / Los Angeles
Full biography and catalogue