Sufjan Stevens has announced that his new album Javelin will be released on Friday, 6th October. The follow-up to 2020’s The Ascension – and Stevens’ first in “full singer-songwriter mode” since Carrie & Lowell, according to the press release – will house 10 tracks, created with friends and artists like The National’s Bryce Dessner, adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, and Pauline Delassus.
The album will also be accompanied by a 48-page book of art and essays by Stevens, involving “meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint word clouds, and iterative color fields”. The first single from the project has also been released, a lilting and colourful track called ‘So You Are Tired’, which you can hear below.
Sufjan Stevens: ‘So You Are Tired’
Dessner supplied acoustic and electric guitar on album track ‘Shit Talk’, and Javelin will close out with Stevens covering the Neil Young classic, ‘There’s A World’.
Stevens has remained fairly busy in the years since The Ascension; he released the ballet score Reflections earlier this year, and released a series of instrumental albums under the Convocations project. Stevens also appeared on The National’s latest album First Two Pages of Frankenstein.
The songwriter’s beloved record Illinois was also turned into a musical in June and July this year in New York. “Illinois will lead us on a mighty journey through the American heartland, from campfire storytelling to the edges of the cosmos,” promoters wrote about the production, which was created by writers Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury.
Sufjan Stevens Javelin Tracklist
- Goodbye Evergreen
- A Running Start
- Will Anybody Ever Love Me?
- Everything That Rises
- Genuflecting Ghost
- My Red Little Fox
- So You Are Tired
- Javelin (To Have And To Hold)
- Shit Talk
- There’s A World
Further Reading
Sufjan Stevens’ Album ‘Illinois’ has Been Turned Into a Musical
Sufjan Stevens Shares Alternate Versions Of ‘Fourth Of July’
Sufjan Stevens Announces Five-Volume Album In Tribute To His Late Father
