changes as Stevens "[replacing] delicately plucked banjo lines, wispy vocals and sentimental melodies with glitchy soundscapes, hip-hop [ sic ] beats and heavily filtered vocals." [ 19 ] Amongst his other work, the 2001 electronic album Enjoy Your Rabbit was regarded as being the most close in style to this album. [ 16 ] Nevertheless, critics highlighted the first track "Futile Devices" as being stylistically consistent with his earlier acoustic work. [ 20 ] Sufjan Stevens himself has said that the album's tracks "are pop songs, but they’re based on sound experimentation and noise". [ 21 ] 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". [ 21 ] 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 . [ 6 ] The album contains no "conceptual underpinnings", [ 16 ] instead focusing on themes that are personal and intimate to Stevens himself; [ 22 ] the label Asthmatic Kitty describes the themes as "personal and primal … love, sex, death, disease, illness, anxiety, and suicide". [ 16 ] A recurrent focus of the album is love,