Brace for heaviness on Leonard Cohen’s final album, You Want It Darker, where it comes in many beautiful and soulful varieties. There’s the octogenarian Cohen, his voice reaching for a deepness of its own digging, and—nearly 50 years since his debut—it’s at its deepest yet. Mixed full and proud by Cohen’s son Adam and co-producer Patrick Leonard, the creak in Cohen’s vocals comes on like a rich stringed instrument—an old cello, maybe—that seems to have gained sentience. And there’s the heaviness of Cohen’s lyrics, as refined and vulnerable as they are filled with wisdom and so incredibly alive. “I’m sorry for the ghost I made you be,” he sings on “Treaty,” one of the album’s many open moments, “only one of us was real, and that was me,” as perfect a couplet about the end of a relationship as any. And keeping it together, the heaviness of the arrangements, which come on like the angel of death with its hand cushioned in velvet, all soft strings (“Steer Your Way”) and humming background vocals (“You Want It Darker”) and the occasional lonesome pedal steel (“Leaving the Table”). Cohen has long used female voices to help trace the contours of his melodies, partly to add a traditionally beautiful contrast to Cohen’s gruffer voice but, on You Want It Darker, it’s Cohen who sounds unearthly, floating over the arrangements with a benevolent curiosity about the places his voice has been, and where it has left to go.