Sufjan Stevens is no stranger to suffering: witness Carrie & Lowell, which outlined a complex relationship with his bipolar mother. In the wake of his 2021 ambient outing, Convocations, which processed the death of his father, Javelin – Stevens’s 10th LP – finds him grappling with existential questions (a regular concern), the desire to kiss and be kissed, and a broken heart. Will Anybody Ever Love Me? asks one track, where the despairing narrator shakes a fist at the sky. Last month, Stevens revealed he has Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition; he is currently relearning to walk.
Once again, sorrow begets beauty. Billed as a return to Carrie & Lowell’s singer-songwriter form after a series of ballet scores and conceptual collaborations, Javelin synthesises two of the major strands of Stevens’s work: the hushed, plucked folk (see: early crypto-religious banger Seven Swans) and the grandiloquent electronic ambition of key latter-day works such as The Age of Adz (2010) and The Ascension (2020). Most songs here start bijou and intimate, and swell to a clanging, polyphonic crescendo. My Little Red Fox begins by underlining the similarities between Stevens and Elliott Smith, before building to a rococo fantasia. Shit Talk features Bryce Dessner on guitar and stretches to eight minutes of shape-shifting, elegiac misery.
