Photo Via Spotify

Maya Jabbari 

Managing Editor

“Sable is that darkness and Fable is this blast off of happiness and joy”

– Justin Vernon (Bon Iver)

Bon Iver—the band best known for their album For Emma, Forever Ago, their song ‘Beach Baby’, and their collaboration on ‘Roslyn’ for The Twilight Saga: New Moon—released their fifth studio album on April 11, following a six-year hiatus.

Titled SABLE, fABLE, it has garnered a rush of support from longtime Bon Iver fans, who had been waiting for the album’s release after years of salmon pink cryptic images and demo leaks from the band. They first released SABLE in October 2024, comprising Disc 1 of the album with a total of four songs. Though this was just the beginning of Bon Iver’s comeback after their years-long hiatus, because Disc 2 emerged with the name fABLE in April, and with it came a bang of unexpected stylistic approaches. Just under 40 minutes of pure haziness, their album, somehow, within that haziness, has moments of soft, calming, and rumbling electricity. In an interview with the lead singer of Bon Iver, Justin Vernon, with ABC News Australia, he says, “Then, by the end [of SABLE, fABLE], there’s sort of a resolve, that it’s all part of the same cycle. There’s a rhythm to everything, there’s never a green pasture that you will endlessly rest in. Life and energy is ever ongoing, and there’s an acceptance to that that I try to find here.” There’s this almost surrealistic feeling you get when you listen to it. It’s not off-putting; rather, it’s warm and foggy. The album’s name itself, SABLE, fABLE, gestures toward a kind of duality. The word “sable” is another way of describing the colour black and black clothing during a period of mourning, while “fable” implies myth-making or a sense of narrative unreliability. In an interview with 91.3 WYEP, Pittsburgh’s independent music source, Vernon explains the album’s deeper meaning, saying: “It’s [SABLE] a look to the past. It’s a kind of an encapsulation of my identity with this whole Bon Iver “guy in a cabin” problem for the last 15-16 years. And fABLE kind of marks this transition that I’ve made [in] my life these last couple of years of finding myself a bit and finding my presence and my joy and my time, my life, you know, my flow.”The meaning behind the album is further sonically represented through Vernon’s voice, which is on full display: he uses it as a malleable instrument, stretching syllables into unintelligible shapes and auto-tuning verses until they blend into a texture you can almost feel. New listeners might be confounded by this stylistic approach, but for longtime fans, it’s an invitation to get lost in the folkness that exists in his previous releases.

But it’s not just Vernon’s voice that displays this musical richness, making the songs thought provoking, it’s the band’s internal connection where it’s blatant that the exact placement of every beat, every chord, and every lyric, has been inserted carefully so everything cooperates with each other effortlessly. It’s specifically the second track on SABLE titled ‘Things Behind Things Behind Things,’ where the band uses the repetition of metaphors like “rings within rings within rings” and  “I can’t go through the motions” to emphasize overcoming internal struggles or barriers—perhaps tied to the band’s secluded beginnings with their early releases—and their renewed connection with music through this album. 

Then, onto fABLE, we immediately feel optimism pouring out from the jump with the first track, ‘Short Story’. It hits you and rushes through you: it feels vibrant. Through this vibrancy, we begin to see the difference between the discs, as the harmony, the vocals, and instrumentals all work hand in hand to create a grounding peace that lives within each song. The last song of the album, ‘Au Revoir’, marks this shift even more distinctly; lyrics do not make an appearance, only the instruments live on. 

This is Bon Iver telling us that, although they cherish For Emma, Forever Ago and other earlier works that dive more into the mellow folk genre, they understand that version of themselves, but they might not want to live it anymore. The seclusion of the whole “guy in the cabin problem” that Vernon talks about,  is over; they are using that version to their advantage, and with this album, they are coming out of the shell they once used to be in.

I’ll leave you with my personal favourite lyric, “I’m a sable/And honey, us the fable”. I urge you, right now, to give “SABLE, fABLE” a listen. It will surprise you.