Bon Iver - SABLE, EP (2024) [Hi-Res]

The three songs that comprise Bon Iver’s new record SABLE, emerged from a long-gestating breakdown. Justin Vernon finally found the time to unpack years of built-up darkness just as the lockdown began. While there are the usual collaborators on this record providing pedal steel (Greg Leisz), fiddle (Rob Moose), saxophone (Michael Lewis), and trumpet (Trever Hagen), SABLE, is largely defined by Vernon’s voice and guitar. The dense layers of i,i are nowhere to be found, as Vernon bears the weight of these songs largely on his own. It’s a retreat and reset.

Stripped back to the primary elements that the project was founded on and recorded in the April Base compound in Wisconsin, these songs were each written at different periods of processing. “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” came first in 2020, born of the restless anxiety and facing up to everything that leads to it. A meditation on the process of unpacking the contexts that inform his contexts—it stares down the long road of putting oneself back together. “S P E Y S I D E” followed a year later, written as an apology to those he’d hurt. “AWARDS SEASON” is the most recent. He wrote entire stanzas on long walks around Lake of the Isles in Minneapolis last year. It’s a song that takes stock of a major and wrenching change.

These songs are reflections of unfinished business, of guilt and anguish. SABLE, is named for near-blackness, the record an externalized projection of his turmoil. This trio of songs represents an unburdening from one of the most trying eras in Vernon’s life. There was a time not long ago where Vernon intentionally hid his face. Here, the blinds are open.