This week brought new albums from a pair of beloved artists who emerged a little over a decade ago as purveyors of artful indie folk:Fleet Foxes, who announced their fourth full-lengthShore on Monday and released it 24 hours later, andSufjan Stevens, whose eighth solo albumThe Ascension arrives today, September 25. Each has navigated listeners’ weighty expectations in their own way: Fleet Foxes by eschewing promotion and embracing the vibrant simplicity of their early songwriting, and Stevens by avoiding the character sketches and personal narratives of his past albums in favor of broader questions about the state of the world. On this episode, Pitchfork Editor Puja Patel is joined by Features Editor Ryan Dombal and News Editor Matthew Strauss for a discussion of both albums and the artists who made them.

Listen to this week’s episode below, and subscribe toThe Pitchfork Review for free onApple Podcasts,Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also check out an excerpt of the podcast’s transcript below. For more, check outMatthew Strauss’ review of Fleet Foxes’Shore andSam Sodomsky’s review of Sufjan Stevens’The Ascension.

Puja Patel: When you say that [Fleet Foxes] appealed to kind of everyone’s tastes—absent the hope of it all, do you have a sonic sense of why?

Ryan Dombal: Yeah, I think it’s the sort of music that for people who are older, the sound probably brings them in. Because it just sounds like things that you might be familiar with from your youth, stuff like the Beach Boys, Simon & Garfunkel.

And then for people who are younger, maybe our friend Matt Strauss can speak to this a little bit more?

PP: Is the implication there that Matt is younger?

RD: Yeah, sure.

Matthew Strauss: I think that might be the implication.

RD: Also just more knowledgeable than me regarding Fleet Foxes!

MS: Yeah, speaking as a former young person who was listening to Fleet Foxes; I think I was 17 whenHelplessness Blues came out, so I could certainly feel helpless. I remember pretty vividly being in the car one day with my mom and putting on the title track ofHelplessness Blues, and trying to go line by line with her and say, “No, this is, I mean, this is so deep. This is such a good song. Do you see what he’s saying?” And I still feel that way.

But it didn’t say to me like, “Oh yeah, I remember the Beach Boys or the Byrds.” It just felt completely new and different, and it felt like something that also, as Ryan alluded to, had some lyrical or intellectual heft to it. At least more so than who at least in hindsight would be kind of the comical peers of early Fleet Foxes, like Mumford & Sons or Lumineers. Bands that are not really taken seriously, but could be on the same Spotify playlist as Fleet Foxes.

PP: I mean, they’re wildly successful, if not more successful than Fleet Foxes.

Did [Shore] sound like what you expected it to sound like? Like what was your expectation and where did it land?

MS: That’s a good question because the band’s comeback albumCrack-Up sounded, I think, very different from however I or anyone else may have expected. It was a lot darker. It was a lot more complicated musically. A lot more depressed, in a good way of being pretty realistic. Especially going back and listening to [Fleet Foxes’] early songs, it’s almost like they don’t make any sense of just what they’re singing about. And now you have these tangible moments.

The one that I think about all the time fromCrack-Up is on the song “I Should See Memphis” where Robin Pecknold sings:

[“I Should See Memphis” plays, “Endless vacation, felt like perdition”]

Fast forward three years later while we’re all on this endless weekend, it’s just a very pretty couplet summarizing how it feels to just go through life not really sure what to make of it.

And so, I perhaps would have expected them to go even deeper into that direction on the new album, but I think it actually returned in some ways more to the vibrancy of the early music.

The second song is called “Sunblind.” On that song, Robin Pecknold sings about swimming.

PP: Can you imagine swimming? Sounds delightful.

RD: Where is he swimming?

MS: You know, that’s an excellent question.

PP: Must be nice, Robin.

MS: According to the song it’s in “American water.” So that narrows it down to 50 states.

If you follow his entertaining and prolific Instagram, it seems like he’s gotten into surfing, or has always been surfing.

PP: He’s had a real glow-up lately, it feels like, in the past few years.

RD: What’s happening on his Instagram?

MS: There was one highlight I was watching recently where he played around with the Pitchfork filter for a while. The one where you hold it in front of your face and it gives you a Pitchfork score. He kept getting 6s and worse and he was feigning being quite upset. This is coming from someone who’s only ever gotten “Best New Music” on his new releases, at least on his initial albums. And so he even at a point tried playing a song fromFleet Foxes and we still gave it something like a 5. So he’s very entertaining.

PP: By “we,” you mean the algorithm, this filter that some fan made.

MS: I don’t know who made the algorithm—I’d like to think that it was you, Puja.

PP: Well, I got a 3.8 on it, so...