sufjan stevens ascends above holding back with 'the ascension'
By Amelia Zollner
For one of the first times in his infamously sensitive career, Sufjan Stevens is pissed off. In his latest album, The Ascension, instead of wallowing in sadness like he seemed to do on Carrie & Lowell, which he proclaimed the successor to The Ascension, he takes control of his own narrative. He points fingers. He writes brutally honest lyrics and layers them over meaty, substantial drum beats. And, in all its 80-minute-long glory, it’s stunning.
At its core, The Ascension is a conglomeration of all of Stevens’s work. It calls back to the revealing lyrics of Carrie & Lowell, the religious themes of Silver & Gold and Songs For Christmas, and the electronic sounds of Aporia and The Age of Adz. It introduces a new dynamic, too: pop music. Paired with music videos that feature precisely choreographed dances (one of which features Jalaiah Harmon of TikTok fame), Stevens presents this album the same way most pop artists would. Especially with ethereal synth-pop singles “Sugar” and “Video Game,” The Ascension is Stevens’s most sonically accessible and universal record. However, he doesn’t lose the lyricism that makes his music special.
It’s an absurd concept for Stevens, who usually hides his intentions behind enigmas, to sing straightforward lyrics like “I don’t wanna play your video game” and “Come on baby, gimme some sugar.” But he makes it work — behind these seemingly shallow, cliche lyrics lies the psyche of a man wrestling with his faith and — now more relevant than ever — political instability.
Stevens’s questions of his own religion are paralleled with his apocalyptic-minded musings about the future of the country and romance. Sometimes, the three are inseparable. When he sings about losing his “faith in everything” during “Tell Me You Love Me,” which appears on the surface to be a love song, is he losing faith in God? A relationship? America? As best shown by the Is This Sufjan Stevens Song Gay or Just About God playlist (which could definitely feature a few songs from The Ascension), it’s all up for interpretation.
And, of course, the combination of these worries, no matter how they’re interpreted, is anxiety-inducing. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Ativan,” is named after an anxiety medication. He personifies the drug, pleading it for him to cleanse him of his fears of growing old and life lacking a purpose: “Tranquilize me, sanitize me, Ativan / Is all for nothing?”
He eventually teeters on the edge of resignation. In the album’s pillar, its title track “The Ascension,” Stevens lists his regrets in a grand contention with despondence, singing, “And to everything there is no meaning / A season of pain and hopelessness.”
But, above all else, Stevens is angry. In his previous works, he tended to sit on the sidelines and merely observe, whether it was by detailing American history, astrology, or his own family. Now, he’s making demands. “Lord, I need deliverance,” he urges in “Make Me An Offer I Cannot Refuse.” In the manifestation-style song “Die Happy,” Stevens speaks his goal into existence. “I wanna die happy,” he repeats over and over as the song’s dismal electronic background builds up into a grandiose, commanding breakdown.
In the past, Stevens was his most assertive in his sparse songs that build up at the end, like The Age of Adz’s “I Want To Be Well.” With The Ascension, almost every song has a satisfying release of emotion like this, a definite moment of catharsis. Whether Stevens is using these songs to cope with anger, disillusionment, or anxiety, their pinnacles offer listeners that same feeling of cleansing, even on some of the album’s less memorable songs like “Lamentations” and “Goodbye To All That.”
With this amount of emotion, it’s hard not to miss the more paranoid, less polished vocals of The Age of Adz in comparison to The Ascension’s overly clean, angelic-sounding vocals. They lend themselves well to the album’s more laidback songs like “Video Game,” but a little more emotion and vocal variation would help the songs.
Additionally, at times, songs like “Make Me an Offer I Can’t Refuse” and “America” close by lingering on discordant notes for an unsatisfyingly long amount of time. It’s a gimmick that grows old quickly. Perhaps, however, Stevens is doing it to mirror the restlessness he feels. In “America,” the album’s 12-minute-long closer that’s half composed of dissonant synths, this can be seen as a reflection of the uncertainty that America’s future, along with Stevens’s faith, holds.
This is made up for by the album’s impeccable sound, though. It calls back to his past synth-pop projects, especially by including a sample of “Climb That Mountain” from Aporia and instrumental features from James McAlister and Bryce Dessner, two of the musicians who worked on Planetarium alongside Stevens. Most notably, the album sonically resembles The Age of Adz, the ten-year-old fan favorite that’s commonly seen as Stevens’s most experimental. With both of their drum-heavy breakdowns, the pair of The Age of Adz and The Ascension feel somewhat like a duo.
The Ascension is lengthy and certainly not meant for casual listening. But it’s one of Stevens’s best projects, and it contains something for everybody, whether they’re here from Illinois, Carrie & Lowell, or The Age of Adz.
Toward the end of the album, on “The Ascension,” Stevens persists on asking the same question, a question that feels more relevant now than ever: “What now?” He sings it softly, as if he’s pleading for an answer, yet it feels like the most demanding thing on the album, as if he’s calling listeners to action. And, surprisingly more than anything else on this album, it sticks, leaving listeners with the same feeling Stevens wrote this album about, the same questions, the same anxiety, the same anger. Which is exactly what a good album should do: make its listeners ask, “what now?”