Moses Sumney / Aromanticism / 2017
Plastic
quietly confessional, melancholic, self-exposing
A brief, confessional song in which a seemingly invulnerable persona admits that his self-presentation is fabricated. Sumney uses the image of artificial wings to expose the gap between how he appears -- confident, soaring, admired -- and the fragile, hungry self underneath.
self-fabrication fragility behind confidence isolation aromantic distance from others the performance of identity
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses someone who perceives him as remote or intimidating, admitting privately that his composed exterior is invented; the voice is intimate but unreliable about its own claims, since it openly flags its own deceptions.
What happens
The song opens with the speaker acknowledging a history of performing strength while actually being wounded, then describes being watched -- caught shining, admired from a distance -- while the person watching keeps away, frightened by his apparent brilliance. The speaker offers a confession as if letting someone close, but the secret he reveals is that the whole image was artificial. The repeated admission about the wings becomes a kind of unraveling, ending in a final line that extends the fabrication to the speaker's entire sense of self.
How it's built
The song moves from two short, image-dense verses into a long, incantatory repetition of a single confessional line, which functions as both chorus and collapse -- the words don't develop, they just repeat until the final couplet reframes them. That closing couplet acts as the volta, generalizing the specific image into a statement about identity itself.
Section by section
Opening verse
“broken and be bold”
The speaker immediately establishes the song's central tension: performing strength while internally damaged. Framing his own praise of himself as a kind of alchemical lie (false metal called precious) signals that self-mythologizing is a survival tactic, not vanity.
Second image cluster
The hunger imagery -- a stomach that feels satisfied simply because it's swollen -- extends the theme of false fullness, suggesting that even the speaker's sense of satisfaction is distorted or self-deceived, a physical echo of the emotional performance described earlier.
Observation and distance
“standing scared of me”
Here the dynamic shifts to how others perceive him: his shine reads as threatening rather than inviting, which isolates him further. The admission that follows is framed as an intimate gift, but it's really a correction of their misreading.
Central repetition
The hook strips away narrative complexity entirely, looping the same confession until it feels less like information and more like a wound being worried at. The repetition suggests the speaker needs to convince himself as much as the listener.
Closing couplet
“my wings are made up”
The pun on 'made up' -- fabricated and invented -- extends the metaphor from the wings to the whole self, collapsing the song's central image into a broader statement about constructed identity and self-doubt.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Wings represent the speaker's outward image of soaring confidence or specialness; revealing they are plastic undercuts any romantic or mythic reading, turning flight into artifice.
- anaphora
- The insistent repetition of the same confessional line mimics obsessive rumination, as if the speaker can't stop circling the admission, intensifying the emotional weight through accumulation rather than new information.
- paradox
- Describing himself as both broken and bold, or an unfed stomach that feels full, captures the contradictory experience of performing wellness while being depleted.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as a meditation on emotional self-protection: the speaker builds a mythic, untouchable image (flight, brilliance, invulnerability) precisely because he fears being truly seen or needed, which aligns with the album's broader meditation on aromantic isolation. A secondary reading hears the plastic wings as commentary on performance and fame specifically -- the artificial persona an artist constructs for an audience that mistakes spectacle for intimacy. Both readings converge on the same core admission: the brilliance others fear or admire is manufactured, and so, the song suggests, is the self that wears it.
Context
Aromanticism (2017) is widely understood as Sumney's exploration of existing outside conventional romantic and social scripts, often framing isolation as a chosen or necessary stance rather than simple loneliness. This track fits that frame by dramatizing the cost of projecting self-sufficiency. I don't have specific production or writing details for this song beyond the album's general themes.
Listen for
- The shift from dense, imagistic verses to the stripped, looping refrain
- How the vocal delivery changes (if at all) across the many repetitions of the wings line
- The quiet vulnerability underneath the hunger imagery in the first verse
- The way the final line reframes everything heard before it, retroactively coloring the repetition as doubt rather than defiance
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