The Age of Adz

The artwork of Royal Robertson, a self-proclaimed prophet from Louisiana,[14] was used for the album's cover and interior.[1] Will Hermes of Rolling Stone said that Sufjan Stevens uses the artwork "as a springboard for music that evokes a visionary psyche."[15] Stevens became interested in the work of Robertson after recording music for a friend's documentary on the artist and said that "[the more I studied him and his work], the more I felt a weird affinity to this guy and the story of his life."[16] He began to transcribe some of the text that appears in Robertson's artwork, and says this process stayed with him a "long time" and "that some of it started to come up in the lyrics, in the songs I was writing.[16]

The Age of Adz marked a radical departure in musical style from that of Stevens' previous album Illinois. Robin Hilton summarised the changes as Stevens "[replacing] delicately plucked banjo lines, wispy vocals and sentimental melodies with glitchy soundscapes, hip-hop beats and heavily filtered vocals."[17] Amongst his other work, the 2001 electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit was regarded as being the most close in style to this album.[14] Nevertheless, critics highlighted the first track "Futile Devices" as being stylistically consistent with his earlier acoustic work.[18]

Sufjan Stevens himself has said that the album's tracks "are pop songs, but they’re based on sound experimentation and noise".[19] He contrasted the way in which the album was made for listeners who understood his interest in "electronic music and noise and in sound sculpting and minimalism", and with Illinois which he described as a "populist record".[19] Professional music critics dubbed the album experimental,[20][21] electronic pop,[22][23] electronica,[24] art rock,[25] electropop,[26] futurepop,[27] electroacoustic,[28] glitch,[29] and synthpop.[30]

The Age of Adz departs from the geography-based concepts of Stevens' previous albums; until his announcement in 2009 that he had never seriously intended to complete the project, it had been expected that his next work might continue the Fifty States Project that he had begun with Michigan and continued with Illinois.[5] The album contains no "conceptual underpinnings",[14] instead focusing on themes that are personal and intimate to Stevens himself;[31] the label Asthmatic Kitty describes the themes as "personal and primal … love, sex, death, disease, illness, anxiety, and suicide".[14]

A recurrent focus of the album is love,[32] a theme that sometimes overlaps with spirituality as Stevens seems to address both a lover and a divine power.[33] Another important theme is that of mortality — the song "Now That I'm Older" has been noted as "repeatedly [acknowledging] mortality and the importance of making the most of life."[33] Acknowledging the interplay of these two themes, the album has been described as having songs "in which love and death reign darkly over an imaginative landscape peopled with apparitions, ghosts, orators and space travellers".[32]

Professional ratings

Aggregate scores
Source	Rating
AnyDecentMusic?	7.5/10[36]
Metacritic	80/100[37]
Review scores
Source	Rating
AllMusic	[31]
The A.V. Club	B[38]
Entertainment Weekly	A−[39]
The Guardian	[40]
The Independent	[32]
Los Angeles Times	[41]
NME	7/10[42]
Pitchfork	8.4/10[43]
Rolling Stone	[15]
Spin	7/10[44]

The Age of Adz received positive reviews upon its release. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 80, based on 33 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[37] Keith Meatto of the Frontier Psychiatrist described the album as "a musical masterpiece that blends analog and digital sounds as it reflects on love and loss, life and death, humanity and divinity".[33] Entertainment.ie's Jenny Mulligan described Stevens as "a strange one, that's for sure, but he may just be a genius".[45] Uncut commented that the album provides plenty of evidence to argue that he is either "one of the most important songwriters of his generation" or "just an infuriating, neurotic show-off".[46] Alexis Petridis of The Guardian said that although the album "goes a bit barmy and over-the-top" there are some "incredible tune[s]" that are "not only genuinely remarkable, but genuinely enjoyable".[40] Alex Denney of NME similarly commented that the album "conjures just enough moments of heart-stopping gorgeousness to foot the bill for its dizzying excesses".[42] Sam Lewis of the BBC remarked on the same point: that the album is "suffused with individual moments of brilliance", but overall it is "let down by its self-conscious incoherence".[47]

The most discussed track of the album among reviewers was "Impossible Soul", which at 25 minutes in length comprises a third of the overall album. Pitchfork's reviewer Ryan Dombal described the track as having "more engaging ideas than most artists could muster in a career",[43] although No Ripcord reviewer Alan Shulman criticized the middle sections as being an "epic train wreck", saying that the closing minutes come as "a breath of fresh air".[48] One Thirty BPM reviewer Rob Hakimian was mixed in his reception of the track, and commented that it would "make or break" the album for listeners, describing it as a successful "proclamation of love", but also "bloated" and "way over the top".[49]

Many reviewing sites included The Age of Adz in their best of 2010 lists.