A new Sufjan Stevens album — a real Sufjan Stevens album — is coming this fall. Javelin is Sufjan’s first album of new original songs since 2020’s The Ascension, which is a pretty quick turnaround where this guy is concerned.

Javelin ends with a cover of Neil Young’s “There’s A World.” With oft-morphing arrangements and a cast of backup vocalists including adrienne maree brown, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Megan Lui, Nedelle Torrisi, and Bryce Dessner, the album is billed as Sufjan’s attempt at ’70s studio opulence. However, lead single “So You Are Tired” basically sounds like Sufjan Stevens, albeit several different permutations of Sufjan Stevens blurring into each other. It starts out as a Radiohead-esque piano ballad and switches into gentle acoustic guitar mode somewhere along the line — but not until after it blooms into something grander, with lots of those guest vocalists tossing their voices around choir-style. The unmistakable voice at the center of it all sounds sad and maybe even a bit bitter, as if some important relationship has come to an end. “So you are tired of me,” Sufjan sings at the end. “So rest your head/ Turning back all that/ We had in our life/ While I return to death.”

By the way, Javelin comes with quite a bit of multimedia accompaniment:

Javelin is accompanied by a 48-page book of art and essays all created by Stevens, including a series of meticulous collages, cut-up catalog fantasies, puff-paint word clouds, and iterative color fields. The 10 short essays — alternatively funny, tragic, poignant, obtuse, and specific — offer little glimpses into loves and losses that have shaped him, and, in turn, these songs.

Hear “So You Are Tired” below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “Goodbye Evergreen”
02 “A Running Start”
03 “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”
04 “Everything That Rises”
05 “Genuflecting Ghost”
06 “My Red Little Fox”
07 “So You Are Tired”
08 “Javelin (To Have And To Hold)”
09 “Shit Talk”
10 “There’s A World”

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