Album review: Carrie & Lowell

The spectre of a troubled childhood hangs over Sufjan Stevens’ seventh studio album — his first foray into conventional songwriting since 2005’s Illinois.

Recorded following the death of his mother — the ‘Carrie’ of the title — the LP is a meditation on grief but also a rumination on Stevens’s peripatetic upbringing, which saw him passed among inlaws while his mother struggled with alcoholism (‘Lowell’ is Stevens’s stepfather, with whom he maintains a cordial relationship).