Sufjan Stevens shares ‘On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better),’ his first holiday song in 15 years, from new comp ‘Worst Christmas Ever!’
Sufjan Stevens has always treated Christmas as a serious artistic project rather than a seasonal lark, and his first new holiday song in nearly 15 years proves the stakes have only deepened. Stevens has shared “On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)“, a reflective original anchoring Worst Christmas Ever!, a 16-track compilation due November 6 via Asthmatic Kitty Records. Built around apology and the quiet labor of asking for forgiveness, it is among the most emotionally exposed entries in a catalog that has long tucked real feeling beneath tinsel and electronics.
The song does not reach for the sleigh-bell maximalism of his earliest Christmas experiments. Instead it moves with the hushed, hymn-like restraint Stevens tends to save for his heaviest material. “On this Christmas, I ask forgiveness for all the funny things I’ve said and done,” he sings, turning a holiday standard’s warmth inward until it becomes something closer to confession. The title promises things get better, but the track earns that optimism by sitting in discomfort first.
A Quarter-Century of Christmas, Distilled
The new track arrives as the centerpiece of a long-overdue consolidation. Stevens began making Christmas music in 2001, when a homemade gift for friends and family snowballed into one of the most sprawling holiday catalogs in indie music, nearly five hours of material spread across the box sets Songs for Christmas (2006) and Silver & Gold (2012). Worst Christmas Ever! finally distills more than 100 recordings into a single album, pairing 15 fan-selected favorites with the lone new original. It is being issued on translucent “Rudolph Red” vinyl, CD, and cassette, with a limited 7-inch of the new song and collage artwork by Ben Giles.
For a project this overgrown, a greatest-hits approach could have felt like tidying up. What keeps it from feeling like mere housekeeping is the new song, which reframes the whole enterprise. Where early cuts like “Sister Winter” and “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!” found Stevens wrestling with seasonal dread and family dysfunction, “On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)” answers them two decades later with something like grace.
The Weight Behind the Wink
The timing gives the song an extra charge. By multiple accounts, it is Stevens’ first newly recorded song of any kind since he recovered from Guillain-Barré syndrome, the autoimmune disorder that temporarily left him unable to walk in 2023, around the release of his album Javelin. Heard with that context, the lyrics about forgiveness and incremental improvement stop reading as holiday boilerplate and start sounding like a report from the other side of a genuine ordeal.
That is the Stevens trick that has always separated his Christmas work from novelty. He uses the most sentimental genre in pop as a Trojan horse for mortality, faith, and repair, the same territory he mapped on Carrie & Lowell and Javelin. A Christmas song about asking to be forgiven is, in his hands, a continuation of his life’s work rather than a detour from it.
It also lands in a crowded holiday-release season, where legacy artists and streaming-era newcomers alike are racing to plant a flag in the Christmas canon. Stevens does not need to compete on volume. His catalog already functions as a modern seasonal standard, quietly accumulating streams every December, and Worst Christmas Ever! gives new listeners a single door into a body of work that previously demanded hours of digging.
Nearly 15 years after he last added to it, Stevens has not reinvented his Christmas sound so much as deepened its emotional register. “On This Christmas (It Only Gets Better)” is small, humble, and a little bruised, which is exactly why it works. For an artist who turned holiday music into confession, that may be the most fitting gift of all.
