Less than a year after resurrecting the glitch opera sounds of Age of Adz on last fall’s The Ascension, Sufjan Stevens is once again announcing new music—this time in the form of a five-LP set titled Convocations, comprised of individual discs called Meditations, Lamentations, Revelations, Celebrations and Incantations. Altogether clocking in at nearly three hours, this project set to be released May 6 takes Stevens’ penchant for near-feature-film-length album runtimes to a new level.
The first of these records, Meditations, will be released this Thursday, preceded by the project’s first single, “Meditation V.” A warped, two-minute ambient track, “V” introduces the record as an exploration of the grief experienced by Stevens after the death of his father around the time Ascension was released, recalling some of the songwriter’s more experimental, cinematic records such as The BQE and the 2017 collaborative album Planetarium. You can hear that single below, and check his YouTube page for a live stream of Meditations this Thursday.
