Carrie & Lowell

AlbumMar 31 / 201511 songs, 43m 44s
Indie Folk Singer-Songwriter
Popular Highly Rated

Sufjan Stevens has taken creative detours into textured electro-pop, orchestral suites, and holiday music, but *Carrie & Lowell* returns to the feathery indie folk of his quietly brilliant early-’00s albums, like *Michigan* and *Seven Swans*. Using delicate fingerpicking and breathy vocals, songs like “Eugene,” “The Only Thing,” and the Simon & Garfunkel-influenced “No Shade in the Shadow of The Cross” are gorgeous reflections on childhood. When Stevens whispers in multi-tracked harmony over the album’s title track—an impressionistic portrait of his mother and stepfather that glows with nostalgic details—he delivers a haunting centerpiece.

9.3 / 10

Sufjan Stevens has always written personally, weaving his life story into larger narratives, but here his autobiography is front and center. Carrie & Lowell is a return to the stripped-back folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of refinement and exploration packed into it.

A

At the end of Carrie & Lowell’s best song—when the gorgeous, gutting “John My Beloved” is already over, really—Sufjan Stevens draws in a sharp breath. It’s a moment he didn’t need to leave in, but it speaks to the mood of his brilliant, stripped-bare seventh album: It sounds almost like the singer is overwhelmed by…

7 / 10

The latest album releases reviewed by the Evening Standard's music critics

9.5 / 10

Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell is a hyper-specific recount of memories from Stevens’ childhood, and of the emotions that…

Check out our album review of Artist's Carrie & Lowell on Rolling Stone.com.

By going through it all, by exposing all the pain, Sufjan’s created something beautiful and vital.

Sufjan Stevens is a songwriter and a musician, so it should come as no surprise that in the wake of the death of his mother Carrie in 2012, his grief took the form of a collection of songs.

Sufjan Stevens' new album sees an ethereal canvas providing the background for a prime batch of plaintive, simple melodies and ruminations on mortality.

8 / 10

When Sufjan Stevens released Seven Swans in 2004, it was unfairly met with apathy by a Fifty States Project-starved listenership waiting for...

8.5 / 10

There's a common phrase placed on art: "a meditation on death," which makes both the art and the act of grieving and realization of mortality seem like a gentle breeze.

9 / 10

Music Review: Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell.

Sufjan Stevens remembers his mother and stepfather on a deeply personal album full of love, loss and forgiveness

10 / 10

Its Stevens’s hope for illumination, rather than the blindness of grief, that lingers most.

6 / 10

8.9 / 10

Review of sufjan stevens' new album 'Carrie & Lowell,' out tomorrow on Asthmatic Kitty records. The single "Should Have Known Better" is now streaming.

Sufjan Stevens’ seventh album finds him returning to the sombre, intimate mood of Seven Swans, and it’s a devastating listen

85 %

Album Reviews: Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell

5.0 / 5

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie and Lowell review: “This is not my art project. This is my life.”

Stevens works through a mess of emotions brought to bear by the death of his mother, says Helen Brown

Experimental songwriter returns to his roots on gut-wrenching new album. Review by Lisa-Marie Ferla

9 / 10