Justin Vernon’s indie folk outfit Bon Iver has returned with ‘SABLE,’ three intertwined offerings exploring the muddling of human thought, resilience of childhood dreams, and accepting personal ceilings in the face of change.

Stream: ‘SABLE,’ – Bon Iver

Heidi Priebe once wrote that “to love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be.”

That it is our duty to traverse lifetimes with them – that these rebirths will sometimes render “an even more luminescent flame,” whereas other times they will be “a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.” It is this darkness that Justin Vernon, primary songwriter and frontman of Bon Iver, is now operating within.

After seismically shifting indie folk with 2008’s For Emma, Forever Ago and 2011’s Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Vernon sat in on his own resurrection with 2016’s 22, A Million. It was the kind of album that set a physical weight on your chest; “This is how we grow now, woman,” he sang on “33 ‘GOD,’” onsetting electronic proof of that very statement. For Emma’s hunger pangs were hurled in favor of emotional maximalism – in all ways, 22, A Million pulled the rug out from under the group’s assumed niche, setting a cycle of chaos and unpredictability in motion.

Pitchfork billed Bon Iver’s next full-length, 2019’s i, i, as a collection of tracks “looking outward, leaving some room for the rest of the world.” But it was that consideration that began to threaten Vernon’s wellbeing as the project’s captain faced the heavy task of both fathering the songs themselves, and having to market himself alongside them. The tours that followed weighed heavily on him as a result. “Being Bon Iver meant playing a part, and intentionally leaning into that role meant frequently pressing hard on a metaphorical bruise,” his website read.

Five years removed from i, i, and the exhaustion that ensued at its peak, Vernon has returned to Bon Iver’s helm for SABLE, a three-track EP named for near-blackness. And while it’s easy to call it a homecoming, Vernon has come a long way from an offering like 2009’s Blood Bank. The heartache that propelled him here isn’t gone, per se – the anxiety of that very prospect is explored on “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” – but he isn’t trying to mimic a younger version of himself, either. Each track journeys between anxiety, guilt, and hope, each emotion delved brutally and breathlessly into, without ever fully circling back to previous projects.

On “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS,” Vernon draws a lyrical parallel between trauma and a garage piled high with accumulated items. Later, he surmises there are “rings within rings within rings,” conjuring the image of a tree trunk aged by the wooden rings surrounding it – rings you can only view when the tree is cut down and examined posthumously.

Some of the lyrics are plainly hopeless: “I can’t go through the motions,” he sings. “How am I supposed to do this now?” But this cynicism is less for the purpose of pity, and more as context of how difficult it is to move on from a period of stagnation. Vernon explains that he gets “caught looking in the mirror on the regular,” and that what he sees there “resembles some competitor” – as is typical for his lyricism, these lines broaden the scope of the song’s meaning to one of poetic universality.

Vernon goes on to sing of avoiding his own tripwires and understanding that one of the senses can immediately trigger the others, given the slightest memory to work with. Moving forward requires looking both ways before crossing, and there is always oncoming traffic in the brain – chances for a new experience to touch “every interactor,” as Vernon sings, pedal steel rising like a full moon behind him.

I never lose
And who’s the benefactor?
And how to move
without touching every interactor

– “THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS,” Bon Iver

“S P E Y S I D E” is a meaningful follow-up because it fulfills its predecessor’s prophecy. As the guitars creep in, clear and crisp, it becomes apparent that guilt is the wound hiding behind anxiety: “I know now that I can’t make good,” Vernon sings. “How I wish I could.” He reflects on the “violent spree” he’s been on, and how his “book” is a “waste of wood” – with little else to block the lyrics from the forefront, it acts as a cutting yet gently hopeful addition. Dissolving into a high-pitched plea, he eventually ponders: “Maybe you can still make a man from me.”

The autumnal quality of both the instrumentation and vocals suggests this is a transformation sonically. Where For Emma offered a colder, more bleak atmosphere, SABLE, exists in a world with a still-smoldering hope. Maybe “S P E Y S I D E” would be the saddest song on someone else’s discography – at one point, Vernon asks point blank: “What is wrong with me?” But this is Bon Iver we’re talking about, and comparatively, the track is less downcast than previous releases.

But maybe you can still make a man from me
Here on Speyside quay
With what’s left of me
As you live and breathe
I really know now what had hold on me

– “S P E Y S I D E,” Bon Iver

There’s much to be dissected in the EP’s second track, but what rises above the rest is the resoluteness of the lyrics. “Nothing’s really happened like I thought it would,” Vernon sings – in a recent profile for The New Yorker, he explained the line: “My best friend Trevor always refers to it as ‘the memory of the future.’ When we were young, if our childhood was good, we project ourselves into a happy adulthood,” he said, surmising that while we do have multiple possibilities in life, we’re not ultimately in control of the wheel. “You’re down below, by the gas and brakes. But that’s all we’ve got.”

While that prospect can be freeing, it can also lead to unwanted yet natural endings. Vernon practices radical acceptance of these severances on “AWARDS SEASON,” the EP’s final track. It is by far the most naked of the three songs, leaving him with both a clearing with which to declutter his mind, and a stage on which to announce some of his wisest truths. This is where SABLE, becomes an act of letting go – as sparse bits of fluttering piano accompany him, he unclasps the treasure in his hands.

I can handle
Way more than I can handle
So I keep reaching for the handle
To flood my heart
And the Spaniard
In song that I have pandered to
Is always handing me the anvil
Saying, “That’s for you”

– “AWARDS SEASON,” Bon Iver

“Felt you through me / In every clue you threw me,” he recalls, perhaps reminiscing on the sparks that ignited at the beginning of the relationship. But what stings the most about this song, apart from the obvious difficulty that letting go presents, is how absolutely human it is in its dissonance. “You know what is great? Nothing stays the same,” Vernon sings. Later, he cries, “Why do things gotta change?”

It’s this constant struggle between the head and heart that pulls listeners in from moment to moment. It’s as if Vernon is singing from a doorway with one foot still in the room, and with every line, he either takes a look back inside or wills his feet to make the complete step outside. Neither impulse seems to win at first, but by the end of the 12 minutes of music, the door has fully closed – whether it’s locked or not is up for debate.

We were on our way
To be best to face
All that comes in gray
It’s so hard to explain
And the facts are strange
But you know what will stay?
Everything we’ve made

– “AWARDS SEASON,” Bon Iver

Vernon confessed recently that during his last run of shows, performing had become an unsafe environment for him. “The crowd is going wild, you know? I’m not mad at them. I would also be cheering for encouragement,” he said of a Duluth show, during which he wept in overwhelm. “But I was thinking, ‘They want this.”

With that batch of performances arriving as a goodbye to the last sixteen years of his life, he learned the art needed just as much room to breathe as he did. “I can’t go to that well over and over again. It has to be something sacred – it has to renew,” he continued. “I come back to the name of the band. It’s a good band name, a good project name, because it’s like – good death, good winter. Things need rest. A life needs to rest at some point.”

On SABLE, Justin Vernon has managed to safeguard the full range of Bon Iver’s reach: Heartache, hope, and healing, in no particular order.

And while it mediates on a cycle of sorrow, it doesn’t spend its runtime chasing its own tail. The resolution hazily reached at its finish is that with time, closing out chapters of life can begin to feel less like a punishment, and more like a chance at renewal.

Maturity is the word. It’s a difficult one, and it doesn’t come without its fair share of hurt, but Vernon’s age is shining through the dark in beautiful technicolor.

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Stream: “AWARDS SEASON” – Bon Iver

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SABLE,

an EP by Bon Iver