A DECADE AGO, DETROIT-BORN folk singer Sufjan (pronounced “soof-yon”) Stevens – at the time an obscure artist whose music ranged from lo-fi folk to worldbeat to electronica – quietly released unto the world the album Come On Feel the Illinoise. The album, often referred to simply as Illinois, is a unique exploration of American history and culture, featuring elaborately-orchestrated songs addressing the state’s many national icons (among them President Abraham Lincoln and Revolutionary War hero Casimir Pulaski) and bizarrities (including the Highland UFO sighting and Illinoisan serial killer John Wayne Gacy) weaved amongst Stevens’ own personal stories, drawing freely from the Bible and a wide variety of other literary works. Illinois rocketed to the top of 2005’s Billboard “Heatseekers” chart and remains Stevens’ most critically-acclaimed work to date.

Illinois joined 2003’s Greetings from Michigan to form the beginnings of the “Fifty States Project” – a planned series of albums to cover each US state that Stevens abandoned shortly after Illinois. In 2010 Stevens followed Illinois with The Age of Adz, which featured frantic electronic pop and heavily-filtered vocals that strayed radically from the mild-mannered folk and decorated instrumentation that made Illinois so successful. Inspired by the apocalyptic imagery of schizophrenic American artist Royal Robertson, Adz is a lyrically jarring, cryptic tale of neurosis and debilitating illness.

Nearly five years passed with nary a musical peep from Stevens after Adz before the release of Carrie & Lowell on March 31, 2015.

Carrie & Lowell marks a return to the bare-bones folk for which many of Stevens’ earlier works are renowned. Its eleven tracks are quite minimal in sound; the album contains no drums and often offers scarcely more than an acoustic guitar and Stevens’ whispery, multitracked vocals. The album hardly resembles typical singer-songwriter folk-pop fare, however; Stevens’ guitar is unusually plucky and almost percussive in nature, particularly in the opening track Death with Dignity and the title track Carrie & Lowell. Carrie & Lowell resembles the work of the late British artist Nick Drake, whose stripped-down style and aggressively introspective lyrics wandered the airways in the early ‘70s.

Despite the absence of a state in its title, Carrie & Lowell could be considered a continuation of the Fifty States Project – Oregon. Carrie & Lowell is a concept album (as is typical of Stevens’ work) that focuses on Stevens’ mother, Carrie. Plagued by depression, schizophrenia, and alcoholism and unprepared to raise children, Carrie abandoned a then-infant Sufjan and his five siblings, moving to Eugene, Oregon and marrying Lowell Brams in the early 1980s. A series of summers spent in Oregon reunited Sufjan with the gallivanting Carrie, but contact became increasingly rare over the course of Stevens’ later childhood. Following her divorce from Lowell after five years of marriage, Carrie drifted into occasional homelessness, all but severing any form of contact with her children back in Michigan.

“As a kid, of course, I had to construct some kind of narrative,” Stevens stated in an interview with Pitchfork, “so I’ve always had a strange relationship to the mythology of Carrie, because I have such few lived memories of my experience with her.”

Stevens’ strained and emotionally frustrating relationship with Carrie came to an end upon her death at the hands of stomach cancer in 2012. In the months following his mother’s passing Stevens felt purposeless, empty, heartbroken despite – or due to – the distance that separated him from his mother. Bottled doubt and existential sorrow are evident in Carrie & Lowell’s poetic but often strikingly literal lyrics; the album speaks of suicide and the fleeting abstraction of emotional and religious uncertainty in equal measure, bridging the gaps that separate reality from the past and from the idealistic internal soundscapes with which we often foolishly associate ourselves and others. With every passing song Stevens seems at first absorbed by himself and his past, oblivious to all else, only to shake off the ice and temporarily conquer his insecurities before sinking back into resigned anguish from whence he came.

“I was so emotionally lost and desperate for what I could no longer pursue in regard to my mother, so I was looking for that in other places,” Stevens said. “At the time, part of me felt that I was possessed by her spirit and that there were certain destructive behaviors that were manifestations of her possession.”

Carrie & Lowell speaks volumes of the cyclic, wandering confusion inherent to mourning; it is an intimate testament to the unflinching finality of death. The album provides closure – an understanding of loss, of neglect and of the insecurity that precedes it – for Stevens. Carrie & Lowell continues Stevens’ ongoing musical biography; in doing so it manages to be its creator’s most lyrically dense and thematically moving work.

“This is not my art project,” Stevens says. “This is my life.”