Sufjan Stevens: Javelin

Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin is an elegy, a confession, and a fragile bridge between despair and redemption. The record arrives shrouded in personal tragedy, dedicated to Stevens’ late partner, Evans Richardson, who passed months prior. Here, Stevens—a songwriter long accustomed to cloaking vulnerability in allegory—strips bare, offering his most unguarded work since his 2015 magnum opus, Carrie & Lowell.

The result is a haunting portrait of indie folk, chamber pop, and spiritual yearning, woven with threads of love, loss, and the quiet terror of existing in a world where “everything heaven-sent must burn out in the end”.

(Album Cover)

The album opens with Goodbye Evergreen, a piano-driven lament oscillating between whispered resignation and orchestral crescendo. Stevens’ voice, light yet fractured, mourns the collapse of a love he once believed was eternal. The track’s title—a likely nod to Richardson’s surname—anchors the album in autobiography, a departure for an artist who once encoded his queer identity in biblical allegory. This newfound directness permeates the record, as on Will Anybody Ever Love Me?, where Stevens pleads, For good reasons, without grievance, not for sport?

The album’s sonic palette mirrors its emotional duality. Tracks like A Running Start and Everything That Rises marry fingerpicked acoustics to lush choral harmonies, evoking the baroque pop of Illinois while feeling distinctly elegiac. Stevens, who produced the album largely alone at home, layers glockenspiels, flutes, and dissonant synthesisers into intimate and cathedral-sized compositions.

On album highlight, Shit Talk, an eight-minute epic featuring The National’s Bryce Dessner on guitar, tension builds through minimalist repetition before dissolving into a cacophony of strings and voices-a sonic embodiment of grief’s uncontrollable swell.

Religion, a recurring motif in Stevens’ work, takes on new complexity here. Genuflecting Ghost intertwines romantic and spiritual devotion, with Stevens offering himself as a sacrificial lamb: Take my body, eat it like a lamb / Tell me anything you need. The track’s hymnal harmonies, courtesy of collaborators like Adrienne Maree Brown and Hannah Cohen, elevate personal anguish to collective liturgy. Similarly, My Red Little Fox merges eroticism and theology, its protagonist wrestling with desire framed as sin.

In dedicating Javelin to Richardson, Stevens invites us into a private sanctum of grief, yet the album transcends autobiography. It is a map of the human condition, charting how loss reshapes identity, how devotion outlives its object, and how art, like a javelin hurled into the unknown, can pierce through darkness, if only for a moment. As Stevens sings on Goodbye Evergreen, I will always love you / But I cannot look at you. In turning away, he permits us to look. 

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By Anish Paranjape

The Department of Entertainment