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· Conor Welsch
From the splintered folk of For Emma to the processed mysticism of 22, A Million, Bon Iver’s journey has been a steady dismantling of boundaries - between genres, between voices, between the self and the collective. With SABLE, fABLE, Justin Vernon continues down this recursive path, crafting an album that feels less like a set of songs and more like a shifting sonic architecture.
It is, in every sense, an album of liminal spaces - between grief and joy, clarity and distortion, vernacular and vapor. It does not resolve. It recurs. It breathes.
SABLE, fABLE is Bon Iver’s most texturally rich record to date. The production is less jagged than 22, A Million, but no less fragmented. Acoustic instruments pulse beneath layers of manipulated sound - horns blur into synths, processed vocals crumble into ambient static, percussion jitters and dissolves.
Tracks like “Walk home” and “Everything is Peaceful Love” showcase Vernon’s ability to sculpt disorder into form. The vocals - sometimes layered in raw falsetto, sometimes digitized into near-extinction - guide the album with a strange, melodic resolve.
There’s something beautifully weary about the pacing. It doesn’t rush. It spirals. It returns.
Bon Iver lyrics have always operated more like visual art than prose - impressionistic, symbolic, riddled with broken syntax. On SABLE, fABLE, Vernon leans deeper into that mode. Lines appear, refract, repeat. Words return across tracks like emotional code: river, bride, phone, tether, grace.
There are no narrative arcs here - only emotional echoes. What emerges isn’t a story, but a feeling. A map with no legend.
Still, buried in the density are moments of unmistakable clarity:
“Can I feel another way? Or are less and more the same?”
"I get caught looking in the mirror on the regular. What I see there resembles some competitor."
“I see things behind things behind things”
They cut through the murk not like revelations, but like memories returning.
One of the most poignant contributions on SABLE, fABLE comes from mk.gee (Michael Todd Gordon), whose presence is immediately felt in the track “From.” The opening guitar riff is unmistakably his - fluid, textural, emotionally exacting. It’s the kind of motif that feels less played than exhaled.
Vernon has spoken at length about the influence Gordon has had on his recent work, citing him as both a creative inspiration and close collaborator. The two live in the same neighborhood in Los Angeles and frequently hang out and make music together. That intimacy shows - “From” sounds like the intersection of their respective vocabularies, a seamless blend of mk.gee’s rhythmic fragmentation and Bon Iver’s melodic abstraction.
SABLE, fABLE will frustrate those looking for hooks, and deeply reward those looking for resonance. It’s not as sonically extreme as 22, A Million, nor as structured as i,i - but it’s arguably the most emotionally whole.
In Vernon’s universe, songs aren’t delivered. They’re uncovered. SABLE, fABLE is another layer peeled back.
For Fans Of: Moses Sumney, James Blake, Thom Yorke, Grouper