5 Years of The Ascension by Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens' album turns the cosmic dread present in a society plagued by COVID into a proclamative pop album. This album is a guide on how to transform grief and faithlessness into hymns depictive of an era. Five years later, it serves as both a pandemic time capsule and a defining entry in Stevens' discographys. The Mic's Willow Bellingham reports.

Sufjan's seventh record, Carrie & Lowell, remains the bleakest release under his name. It remains a starkly intimate and personal outlier in his discography, often consumed by grief so intense that the record barely registers as art, let alone entertainment; "This is not my art project, this is my life," he told Pitchfork in 2015. The next time that Sufjan would return with an "art project" record would be in 2020 with The Ascension, a sprawling electronic masterpiece fueled by both new and familiar sources of grief - all of which manifest as all-consuming cosmic dread.

While The Ascension can be described as a spiritual successor to Sufjan's prior electronic outing, The Age of Adz, the two projects are almost tonal opposites. From the moment Futile Devices dissolves into silence, Adz doesn't stop feeling like an apocalyptic celebration for a single moment; Sufjan never sounds alone, even when he is. The opposite can be said for The Ascension, which may feature contributions from Casey Foubert, James McAlister, Emil Nikolaisen, and even The National's Bryce Dessner. However, it has a sense pure isolation akin to watching a man drift alone through the cold kaleidoscope of a deep-space nebula. Additionally, where Adz often evoked records like Michigan and Illinois with its ornate arrangements and unconventional time signatures, The Ascension is an experiment in pure pop, with standout tracks like Lamentations and Sugar picking up where Adz highlight I Walked left off.

Crises of faith are nothing new in Sufjan's music; the climax of his somewhat overlooked record about the state of Michigan is titled Oh God Where Are You Now? to name a single example. The Ascension, however, is an 80-minute crisis of faith in everything there felt like there was left to have faith in during the years that followed Carrie & Lowell. The closing track America appears to be an unconventional choice for a first single on paper - a 12-minute song with over half of the runtime dedicated to a meandering drone outro. In retrospect, it's an ideal thesis statement for the full record. Sufjan conjures such a complex portrait of the disillusionment he feels with his country - in the depths of the first Trump presidency at the time - using sentences beginning almost exclusively with "I have" and "I am," before the chorus becomes a gutting prayer: "Don't do to me what you did to America," followed by the more unsettling "Don't do to me what you do to yourself." For much of the record, the crises of faith are literal; opening track Make Me an Offer I Cannot Refuse is uncharacteristically commanding, calling upon God with imperatives and a palpable sense of urgency ("I have lost my patience"). Ursa Major is a gentler plea for God's presence, shifting from melodic beauty to violent discord every time he receives no answer.

The middle of the album is easily the most turbulent section of the journey. Every track between Landslide and Goodbye to All That features piercing, almost painful sounds, building alien and hostile environments with synths and drum machines alone. An explosion is made out of a song with few other lyrics than its bleak title - Die Happy - while the pulse of pounding, industrial IDM on the following Ativan transforms one of his most desperate songs into arguably his most aggressive. However, it isn't until the penultimate track that one of the most important moments in his entire discography surfaces - the song that gave the record its name. The title track is as stunning as it is heart-breaking, with Sufjan realising in real-time that he has no way to tangibly change the world for the better. It's a tough sentiment to hear from an artist whose music has brought so many listeners comfort through such sensitive depictions of grief, queerness, joy, sorrow, and hope. It ends with a simple question repeated - "What now?"

If there can be cosmic dread, there can be cosmic love. Throughout The Ascension, Sufjan has an impossible ability to channel both simultaneously until the lines between the two start to blur. On Run Away with Me, a beautiful choice for a second track, he can't help but focus on what he and his love are running from at first ("They will terrorize us / They will paralyze us"), but the song's transcendental chorus quickly follows through with its promise and sheds all despair after the first verse. Tell Me You Love Me is similarly marred by disappointment and worry until the song cathartically erupts into irrepressible, neon-lit adoration. For every moment of euphoric, otherworldly beauty, there's a moment like Goodbye to All That, which finds Sufjan driving in his car towards someone wonderful. The song utilises elements of the previous track, Death Star, a doomsaying declaration of imminent peril. This record was born from terrifying, apocalyptic times; paradoxically, there's some comfort in getting to say it has existed for five whole years. It's far from Sufjan's most beloved work, but The Ascension remains a defining record of the pandemic era and an important piece in the discography of a generational songwriter. It exists between the fear of losing everything and hope that even then, somehow, there will still be something left to hold on to. "I've lost my faith in everything," Sufjan says. "Tell me you love me anyway."

Willow Bellingham

Edited by Daniela Roux

Photo courtesy of Band Camp