Bon Iver pens a surprisingly bright new chapter on SABLE, fABLE

Dancing cats and men dressed like magical creatures abound in the John Wilson-directed video for “Everything Is Peaceful Love,” but it was Justin Vernon who was playing the real trick all along. When the artist behind the Bon Iver moniker released his pitch-dark SABLE, EP last fall, many fans (including this writer) hailed it as a long-awaited return to form—specifically that of his stunning, sorrowful debut For Emma, Forever Ago, which made Bon Iver a household name and kicked off the band’s tale 18 years ago. Those three songs—the anxious “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS,” repentant “S P E Y S I D E,” and sparse, hymn-like “AWARDS SEASON”—are an integral part of the band’s new SABLE, fABLE LP, which tacks on nine additional tracks after the comma. (The fable, if you will.) The original three are still impressive in their new context, but they tell an entirely different story with the lights on.

SABLE, “almost started to become a cartoon of sad Bon Iver music,” Vernon told The New York Times last month. “I like the songs a lot, but they were kind of these last moments, the last gasping breath of my former self that really did feel bad for himself. This feels like a return, but an update, so I was just like, hey, for all the people that just want to stay sad, this is for you.” 

It turns out Vernon is not one of those people. In the uncharacteristically robust press tour for this album, the artist spoke at length about the extreme anxiety that came with both his astronomical rise to fame and what felt like the constant need to bleed out on stage night after night. It took a lot of work—he got off the road, went to rehab to quit smoking, and moved to L.A. where he began to feel more “anonymous”—but in the six years since the release of Bon Iver’s last album, i,i, he actually started to feel happy again. “It’s probably been six months since I’ve had a boot [pressing on my chest], even for 30 seconds,” he told The New York Times. “I think I love myself more.” 

You can feel the weight of that release in “Short Story,” the first new song on the album and the sonic equivalent of Vernon’s first steps into Oz. Vernon has always been especially good at creating immediately transportative soundscapes, a talent sought out by a vast array of collaborators from Taylor Swift to Charli xcx to Kanye West over the years. That skill is on full display here, even as the artist transitions into something a little less esoteric than his previous offerings. Somehow, he manages to perfectly capture the painful euphoria of readjusting one’s eyes to the light after years of living in the dark. “Oh, the vibrance / Sun in my eyes,” he sings over a maximalist burst of sound that immediately shatters the For Emma illusion of the first three songs and errs closer to the lush and experimental arrangements that dominated his later works. 

But while those comparisons are instructive, they don’t fully capture the goal of this record; in fact, on the same track, Vernon seems to instruct listeners not to compare the album to anything they’ve heard before. “January ain’t the whole world / And fall is really over,” he sings, dismantling the cycle of season-themed albums that defined his discography up to this point in two lines. It’s a new day for Bon Iver, one that also sees the frontman penning some shamelessly goofy lyrics like “Damn if I’m not climbing up a tree right now” on the airy “Everything Is Peaceful Love” and “Of this I am certain of / You was made for me” on “Walk Home,” a little ditty about sex that’s more explicitly sensual than anything we’ve heard from him before. 

It’s the most straightforward—And dare we say, corny?—album Vernon has ever released. But at the same time, knowing how burdened he was by the weight of his own mythology, the unpretentious nature of these lyrics (at least by Bon Iver standards) feels almost euphoric. Gone are the SAT words, the gigantic, arena-ready arrangements, and for the most part, the untypable song titles. Yes, “S P E Y S I D E” is really styled like that and yeah, the final word in “There’s A Rhythmn” is intentionally spelled wrong, but that’s still a world away from “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” or “21 M◊◊N WATER.” 

That’s not to say that there aren’t some great lyrical moments here as well. “Walk Home” pulls off a clever reversal of SABLE,‘s pandemic-inspired isolation, in which Vernon tells his lover that he “wants to be inside” with them, but they “Don’t need no window curtains / And we can let the light come in.” The sparseness that was so refreshing on the EP also gives way to a few well-chosen collaborators, including Dijon and Flock Of Dimes on “Day One,” Danielle Haim on the well-layered duet “If Only I Could Wait,” and producer Jim-E Stack. The album’s back half touches on the same expansive sound that became such a safe space for Vernon in the latter part of his career, only here, it feels more like a community than a place to hide. After almost two decades, the artist is finally letting himself be known.

The album’s standout track comes right at the end. “There’s A Rhythmn,” the longest of the new tracks at just over five minutes, spells out the journey Vernon has detailed in interview after profile after press note with stunning, affecting clarity. “I’ve had one home that I’ve known / And maybe it’s the time to go / I could leave behind the snow / For a land of palm and gold / But there are miles and miles to go / And I’ve been down this road before / There’s another chance to show / No need to crow no more,” he sings in the song’s second verse, at once referencing to his move from Wisconsin and hinting at a step away from the spotlight’s chilly glow.

In the leadup to this album, Bon Iver’s label, Jagjaguwar, teased it as an “epilogue” for the band. “Au Revoir”—the album’s delicate, wordless outro—certainly feels like some sort of goodbye. If this truly is the last we hear of Bon Iver, Vernon is closing the book on a well-earned happy ending—one fans will likely want to read until they know the whole story by heart.