Moses Sumney / Aromanticism / 2017
Quarrel
wounded, controlled, simmering
A spare, hymn-like track that reframes an unequal relationship as something closer to a power imbalance than a romance. Moses Sumney borrows the language of biblical parable and racial allegory to argue that calling this conflict a 'lovers' quarrel' flatters an asymmetry that is actually domination.
power imbalance racial otherness failed intimacy moral framing of language isolation
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addressing a partner or dominant figure directly, arguing against the terms used to describe their relationship; the voice is lucid and analytical even as it describes pain, which makes it feel more credible than melodramatic.
What happens
The song opens with biblical allusion establishing an unequal exchange of giving and asking, then moves into direct address, rejecting the label 'quarrel' as a euphemism that implies equal footing. It builds through accusations of privilege and incuriosity, repeats its central refusal as a refrain, and ends by stripping away the premise of partnership entirely, declaring the two parties can never be lovers while one remains cast as 'other.'
How it's built
Built on wordless humming passages that bookend and separate verses, giving the song a liturgical, incantatory feel. Verses accumulate argument and imagery while the hook repeats a flat negation rather than resolving melodically. The final section drops the verse structure almost entirely, collapsing into a two-line chant that functions as the song's thesis, stripped of ornament.
Section by section
Opening verses
The speaker sets up a moral economy of giving and asking, suggesting they want little, while gesturing toward concealed truths that only become visible with time or light. The invocation of Jericho's walls implies an exterior of toughness hiding a cold or hardened interior.
First refrain
“Don't call it a Lovers' Quarrel”
The refusal lands as a correction mid-argument, rejecting the softness of romantic vocabulary for something more honest, likely closer to exploitation or neglect.
Second verse
The speaker widens the accusation, invoking privilege, entitlement, and a lack of curiosity about identity or origin, which shifts the song from a purely romantic register toward something closer to social or racial critique.(The reference to someone's family pointedly raises the question of lineage and belonging.)
Argument against the label
“so immorally implies / we're equal opponents”
This is the song's clearest thesis statement: naming a conflict a quarrel assumes symmetry, and the speaker argues that assumption itself is unjust, since only one party has the tools or standing to fight.
Closing chant
“we cannot be lovers 'cause I am the other”
The song abandons metaphor for direct declaration, collapsing the relationship's possibility entirely by tying it to the speaker's position as outsider, which reframes the whole song as being as much about exclusion and difference as about romance.
Craft
- biblical allusion
- References to giving/requiring and to the walls of Jericho cast the relationship in scriptural terms, framing the imbalance as something ancient, structural, and almost doctrinal rather than personal.
- refrain as argument
- The repeated refusal to use a certain label functions less as a hook for pleasure and more as a rhetorical insistence, wearing down the listener the way an argument repeated under duress might.
- wordless vocalizing
- The humming sections act as a kind of breath or mourning sound between statements, suggesting emotion that exceeds language, and they formally separate the song into chant-like stanzas.
- semantic argument
- The lyric explicitly interrogates vocabulary itself, insisting that calling conflict a 'quarrel' falsely implies two equal antagonists, which turns the song into a critique of euphemism.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats this as a song about romantic disempowerment that is also, deliberately, legible as racial allegory -- the imagery of otherness, inquiry into lineage, and talk of inherited luxury versus burden suggest Sumney is using a failed romance to talk about being perpetually positioned as outsider, whether in intimacy or in a broader social sense. A narrower reading would take it purely as a breakup song about someone unwilling to meet the speaker halfway, with the 'other' language simply meaning emotionally peripheral rather than racially coded. Both readings can coexist; the song's power comes from refusing to resolve which frame is primary.
Context
Aromanticism (2017) is largely concerned with alienation from romantic and sexual norms, and Sumney has spoken in interviews around that era about exploring Blackness, queerness, and asexual/aromantic identity as overlapping forms of otherness; I'm not certain of exact quotes, so treat that framing as informed inference rather than confirmed authorial statement.
Listen for
- the way the humming interludes function almost as sung silence between arguments
- the shift from romantic vocabulary to more legalistic words like 'equal opponents' and 'antagonize'
- how the refrain never resolves melodically, mirroring the unresolved relationship
- the stark, nearly spoken quality of the closing lines compared to the more melismatic verses
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