A brand new Sufjan Stevens album — a actual Sufjan Stevens album — is coming this fall. Javelin is Sufjan’s first album of recent unique songs since 2020’s The Ascension, which is a reasonably fast turnaround the place this man is worried.

Javelin ends with a canopy of Neil Younger’s “There’s A World.” With oft-morphing preparations and a solid of backup vocalists together with adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Megan Lui, Nedelle Torrisi, and Bryce Dessner, the album is billed as Sufjan’s try at ’70s studio opulence. Nevertheless, lead single “So You Are Drained” principally seems like Sufjan Stevens, albeit a number of completely different permutations of Sufjan Stevens blurring into one another. It begins out as a Radiohead-esque piano ballad and switches into mild acoustic guitar mode someplace alongside the road — however not till after it blooms into one thing grander, with numerous these visitor vocalists tossing their voices round choir-style. The unmistakable voice on the heart of all of it sounds unhappy and possibly even a bit bitter, as if some vital relationship has come to an finish. “So you’re uninterested in me,” Sufjan sings on the finish. “So relaxation your head/ Turning again all that/ We had in our life/ Whereas I return to demise.”

By the way in which, Javelin comes with fairly a little bit of multimedia accompaniment:

Javelin is accompanied by a 48-page guide of artwork and essays all created by Stevens, together with a sequence of meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint phrase clouds, and iterative shade fields. The ten brief essays — alternatively humorous, tragic, poignant, obtuse, and particular — provide little glimpses into loves and losses which have formed him, and, in flip, these songs.

Hear “So You Are Drained” beneath.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Goodbye Evergreen”
02 “A Operating Begin”
03 “Will Anyone Ever Love Me?”
04 “The whole lot That Rises”
05 “Genuflecting Ghost”
06 “My Purple Little Fox”
07 “So You Are Drained”
08 “Javelin (To Have And To Maintain)”
09 “Shit Speak”
10 “There’s A World”

Javelin is out 10/6 on Asthmatic Kitty. Pre-order it right here.