Sufjan Stevens

Carrie & Lowell

This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.

With its quiet meditations on mental illness, God, and death, Carrie is a hauntingly beautiful bummer.

No matter how desperate Sufjan gets ...he’s resolutely serene, his emotion swathed in glistening guitar tones and angelic harmonies, spooling out his genius as casually as breathing.

For one thing, he hasn't made an album this restrained in its sonic palette since 2004's Seven Swans ...  For another, he's never produced an album this nakedly autobiographical, so stripped of complex conceptual trappings

Stevens invites us to peer into a cathartic moment in his life without any trace of irony, bound by his faith, the geniality of his compositions often belying the grief that hides beneath the surface.

A painful but rewarding listen, with "Fourth Of July" and "The Only Thing" among his finest songs.

Carrie & Lowell demonstrates, brilliantly and harrowingly, over and over again, how life’s most valuable lessons can only be gleaned by enduring its worst circumstances.

A collection of songs as captivating, poignant and finally, ultimately, redemptive as any that Stevens has produced.

Carrie & Lowell is a miracle of aesthetic balance—a calm and considered confession. It is the roaring in your ears as you look out to sea with the entirety of the known world behind you.

Carrie And Lowell is an introspective, deeply thoughtful album but it deftly avoids self-indulgence. It feels like a healing process, not just for its creator, but for its audience too.

It may well be our first insight into the real Sufjan. It's heavy, but so very beautiful.

There is much to love about Carrie & Lowell for both longtime fans, and those finally looking to hear what this Sufjan guy is about. It is quintessentially him, but offers a new side that is so human and powerful.

Despite its light-handed approach, Carrie & Lowell strikes with a sort of urgency unparalleled across the composer's 15-year career. 

Stevens has always dwelled on the grand mysteries and big questions of life. But on Carrie & Lowell he is stripped bare, revealing his deepest wounds.

Carrie & Lowell is the sound of Stevens trying to process this loneliness, and to find some peace and kinship through his music. That he can create such beauty in such sorrow is, without exaggeration, the very reason art came to be.

This is a record of searing honesty and stark soul-bearing emotion.

Rarely have his revelations been as direct, or as personal, as on Carrie & Lowell, a cathartic exercise exploring the effect of his estranged mother Carrie’s death on him two years ago.

Lyrically it's uncompromising, dark and surprisingly direct – mentions of blood, death and ghosts are plastered all over its 11 tracks – but there's a real beauty to Carrie & Lowell that shines through the darkness.

Stevens strips his sound far enough to reveal his deepest anguish; neither the Disney-style orchestras of 2005's Illinois nor the synth-pop-as-craft-project of 2010's The Age of Adz peek through his acoustic fingerpicking and warm-milk voice.

Though it’s easily his best and most powerful album since 2005’s Illinois, it never quite reaches the same sweeping highs of that epic concept album. But this effort is a success on its own terms, hushed as they may be.

Despite soul-baring moments, it almost feels like we learn more about Carrie than we do her son; he remains a beautiful enigma.

Carrie & Lowell is so dark and deep, those of a sensitive disposition might need to rehydrate once they remove their headphones.

You won’t walk away humming the tunes, but Carrie and Lowell will stay with you. Sufjan has prettier albums, and sweeter albums, but none has the impact of Carrie and Lowell.

It's Stevens' own life and relationships that he mines here with his trademark deftness and nuance. And gosh, what agonizing, cathartic beauty he's shared.

A tender, affecting album that, through its jumble of religious allusions, nature imagery, classical references, half-remembered visions and overwhelming sense of loss, has a simple message.

While death and pain are major players in this collection of songs, the record is more about love than tragedy - although it can still make you bawl your eyes out if you listen to the words closely enough.

Suf(j)an "Subaru" Stevens comes through with an incredibly sad, personal, and subtle record with Carrie & Lowell.

The trouble isn’t that Stevens hasn’t mastered this brand of wispy folk-pop—it’s that he has, on album after album, leaving little that’s new to explore.