Bon Iver's SABLE and the EP as Formal Recovery

Bon Iver released SABLE on 18 October 2024 through Jagjaguwar, three tracks and roughly twelve minutes of new music, the first studio material under the project’s name since i,i closed the decade-long first cycle in August 2019. The EP arrived with no album rollout, no extended press apparatus, no tour campaign. Vernon announced it by posting a single cover-image tile on Bon Iver’s Instagram in August 2024. The tracks landed. That was the release.

I have been listening to SABLE since its release weekend in October, at the time driving to Lithgow and back for reasons unrelated to the record, and I want to argue for the specific thing the EP is doing that the broader conversation around it has largely missed. The three songs are the return Vernon appears to have been trying to make for five years. The form (the EP, not the album) is what let him make it.

Why the five-year gap matters

The Bon Iver discography divides, on reflection, into two distinct cycles. The first cycle (For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, Bon Iver, Bon Iver in 2011, 22, A Million in 2016, i,i in 2019) moved from the specific cabin-recorded folk register Vernon established in Wisconsin to a maximalist digital-folk collage on 22, A Million and then back to a considered band-record register on i,i. The arc was legible. Each record extended or complicated the previous record’s logic.

The second cycle, if we can call it that, has been harder to read. Vernon worked with Taylor Swift on folklore and evermore in 2020 and Midnights in 2022, produced and collaborated across the Big Red Machine project with Aaron Dessner, and released no material under the Bon Iver name for five years. The specific public Vernon of 2020 to 2024 has been a collaborator, a producer, a guest vocalist, and a festival performer, but has not been the Bon Iver auteur figure the first cycle constructed.

The specific question SABLE is answering is what Bon Iver can be on the other side of that five-year public reassignment. The answer, across three tracks, is that it can be something more compressed and less mannered than the first cycle’s late records suggested.

The three tracks

“THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS” opens the EP with Vernon’s voice closer to the microphone than on any Bon Iver release since the debut. The production (credited to Vernon with long-time collaborators Chris Bear, Rob Moose, and Jim-E Stack across specific sessions) is sparse in a way the recent collage records have not been. A guitar. A voice. Specific space around both. The song is three minutes and fourteen seconds long and does not lean on the digital-folk texturalism that had become Bon Iver’s recognisable late-cycle signature.

“S P E Y S I D E” is the centrepiece, in my read. Vernon sings closer to a country register than anything he has previously released under the Bon Iver name, with the song built around a specific guitar figure and a vocal line that sits on the edge of the singer’s full chest voice rather than drifting into the falsetto the project is known for. The song is a break-up song (ambiguously addressed, not explicitly named) and the emotional register is specifically direct in a way the 22, A Million era material went to some length to avoid.

“AWARDS SEASON” closes the EP with a longer arrangement that reintroduces some of the digital-folk apparatus of the earlier cycle, but uses it sparingly and in specific service of a song whose melodic core is strong enough to carry the texture rather than be carried by it. The track is five minutes, longer than the other two combined, and the arrangement builds across its length to a final passage that reads, in the context of the EP, as a specific kind of sonic commitment: Vernon willing to take his time again, having earned the time by tightening up first.

The EP as form

The album has been the dominant format across Bon Iver’s cycle and across most of the indie-rock ecosystem of the last two decades. The EP has been, by contrast, a marginal form: typically a pre-album tease, a live-session release, a remix package, a compilation of outtakes. Full-length records have carried the specific weight of artistic statement and the EP has carried the specific weight of incidental material.

SABLE is doing something different. The three tracks are a complete statement of intent. They are not outtakes, they are not a tease for a forthcoming album (though the follow-up LP SABLE, fABLE has been announced for April 2025), and they are not an incidental release. They are the point.

The specific argument the form is making, by existing as a finished object at this scale, is that Vernon has something to say in twelve minutes that he could not say in forty-five. The record’s sparseness is not a limitation imposed by time or material. It is the deliberate scale of the work. The EP is the record.

This is, in contemporary indie rock, unusual. The closest comparable recent release I can think of is Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future from March 2024, which is not an EP but is organised with the same specific austerity (voice, guitar, specific spacing, no digital arrangement maximalism) that SABLE deploys. The two records read, to me, as parallel arguments about what the indie-folk register can still do when it commits to its specific strengths.

What the EP argues for

The specific thing SABLE argues for, across its twelve minutes, is that Bon Iver as a project can still produce work that feels like new thinking rather than catalogue extension. The late records (22, A Million and i,i) were good records that carried some of the structural weight of established-artist expectation. SABLE has been made, as far as I can tell from listening, with less of that weight. The result is a record that sounds like an artist rediscovering the specific things his voice can do when it is not asked to do the thing it has been doing for ten years.

The EP is also arguing for the EP. The specific form, deployed at this scale and at this level of finish, makes a case that full-length records are not the only register in which substantial statements can be made. This is a case worth making. The 2020s have been a decade in which the streaming economy has pushed artists toward either the hyper-compressed single (optimised for algorithmic distribution) or the over-extended album (optimised for streaming durations). The EP, as a deliberate intermediate form, has been underserved.

The fABLE question

The announced follow-up SABLE, fABLE (April 2025) will reincorporate SABLE’s three tracks into a longer record. This is the specific commercial move that full-length records require; the EP as standalone object is not, in the current industry structure, a primary commercial format. The reincorporation raises a specific question about whether the EP’s argument (that twelve minutes can be the finished work) is being walked back by the album that subsumes it.

My provisional answer, before hearing fABLE, is that the reincorporation does not undermine the EP. The three tracks will sit inside a longer record and will continue to carry the specific statement they are making. The longer record will carry a different statement. Both can be true.

What to do with it

Listen to SABLE at the scale it was released at. Twelve minutes is a reasonable commute. Three songs is a reasonable round of attention. Do not put the EP on shuffle inside a larger playlist. The sequence matters; the three songs are arranged specifically, and the arc they describe across twelve minutes is part of the work.

I have played the EP probably forty times since October and it is still rewarding specific attention. Vernon has made a record that is quieter, more direct, and more structurally specific than the late first-cycle material. The five years have been worth it. The twelve minutes have been worth it.

Put it on. Drive somewhere. Let it run once through. Then run it again.