SABLE, fABLE by Bon Iver

The other day in a group of long-time friends, the question “who is your favorite artist, based on your Top 31 reviews since it began?” came up. I hesitated in answering, opening the door for my friend Ryan (he whose name is frequently dropped within these posts) to snap call “The National.” At the time, I thought that was likely the right answer, but I needed to confirm. So just now I asked ChatGPT, “What musical artist is mentioned the most throughout the website baconreview.com?” and it responded “Short answer: Aaron Dessner (and, closely tied with him, Justin Vernon / Bon Iver) is almost certainly the most-mentioned artist figure across The Bacon Review.” And then it dove into a longer answer it titled “🥓 The Bacon Review is heavily “National-verse” coded” complete with the bacon emoji. I’ve never felt more seen by a non-human entity.

It is with that clear bias in mind that I dive into the review of my #4 album of 2025, Bon Iver’s return-to-form fifth album, SABLE,fABLE. It’s been six years and an entire pandemic since the last Bon Iver album came out (i,i was #9 in 2019). We’ve seen other incarnations of Bon Iver (or Justin Vernon, the driving force behind the band)¹ in the interim, including his collaboration with The National’s Aaron Dessner as Big Red Machine, whose 2021 album How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last? was #2 in 2021, along with guest appearances with Taylor Swift (#4 in 2020) and The National (#2 in 2023).

Where my love of bands like The National is rooted in consistent, predictably-good dad rock, my love of Vernon and Bon Iver lies more in his unpredictability. If I see his name attached to something, I can almost always count on it being great. But what I can’t count on is what it will sound like before listening. Quiet acoustic tenderness; loud cacophonous digital soundscapes; a buttery high falsetto; a gruff baritone — Bon Iver have been perfecting all of these distinct and distinctly different sounds over the last two decades.

In addition to their 2019 album mentioned above, Bon Iver has been scattered all over the Top 31 since I started charting albums in 2009. I loved their 2009 4-song EP, Blood Bank EP, so much that I included it at #17 in 2009. Their Best Alternative Music Album Grammy-winning album Bon Iver, Bon Iver landed at #6 in 2011 (I distinctly remember the ensuing “Who the hell is Bonny Bear?” that immediately followed their win). And in 2016, their album 22, A Million was my #1 album that year. SABLE,fABLE is a combination of everything that is great about all those older albums, yet the differences in soundscape hold together throughout the album in a way you wouldn’t think possible.

The album starts with four(-ish) songs that were originally released as a 4-song EP titled simply SABLE in October 2024.² After the 12-second digital tone track that opens the album, the three songs that follow (“Things Behind Things Behind Things,” “S P E Y S I D E,” and “Awards Season” (featured in the video above)) harken back to the acoustic, quiet sound from the early-days of their fantastic debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago, through the 2009 EP and 2011 self-titled album. All three songs have a video directed by Errin Springer, a Wisconsin-based photographer and videographer. Written and recorded during the pandemic, the songs create what Vernon has called a “triptych”:

“They feel like an equidistant triangle, a triptych. It’s three, and it couldn’t be longer. It runs the gamut from accepting anxiety to accepting guilt to accepting hope. Those three things in a row. There’s no room for a prologue or an epilogue at that point. Because that’s it — that’s what everything is.”

From there, the fABLE portion of the album brings in the rest of the band for a more full, all-encompassing set of songs. The 2nd song on this disc, “Everything Is Peaceful Love” (the video was directed by John Wilson, from the great HBO Max series How To With John Wilson, which Vernon calls “Simply the most poignant and hilarious program in all of Television.”), features a rinky-dink drum machine and a robust chorus. Song there, called “Walk Home,” has a machine-affected voice in the chorus evoking later Bon Iver.

Bon Iver (or as my eight-year-old daughter once requested to hear, “Boney Eye-ver”) and producer Jim-E Stack (who also produced Lorde’s fantastic Virgin back at #14) go fully into Vernon’s love of digitally-manipulated sound structures in the fourth song, “Day One”. The song features Dijon (whose own fantastic 2025 release, Baby, would have been on this list if it were the Top 40 rather than Top 31) and Flock of Dimes (aka Jenn Wasner, who has appeared at #12 in 2021 as well as at #9 in 2018 as part of her other project, Wye Oak). The video shows people auditioning to take over Vernon’s place as Bon Iver after he has “announced his retirement.”

“From,” the fifth song on the album, has a definite late-twentieth century vibe, evoking similarities to Vernon’s collaboration with Bruce Hornby on the last Bon Iver album. The video has an equally-dated appearance, recorded straight-to-VHS (or doctored to appear as such) and featuring Vernon as the for-hire driver of a white stretch limo from the 80s. Danielle Haim (from HAIM, who appeared at #19 in 2021, and whose 2025 album I Quit Tour barely missed this year’s Top 31) sings backup on “I’ll Be There” and gets a “featured” on the following song, “If Only I Could Wait,” two of the more pop-driven, accessible songs on the album. The last two songs bleed into one, as reflected in the joint video for them both. “There’s a Rhythm / Au Revoir” feels like the best way to wrap up a phenomenal album. They’re slower, winding down an album that’s felt heavy, emotionally, if not actively so.

If you’ve got some time on your hands, I recommend checking out the DVD Commentary that Vernon and producer Jim-E Stack put together for the album. It has lots of great insight into the making of the album, including learning that “Awards Season” (likely my wife’s favorite song of 2025) was originally going to be entirely a cappella, or that Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath (#16 in 2020, and #19 in 2017) is sampled in the background of the song (from a song called “Miles Away” that she did with artist Phil Cook, who also happens to be Vernon’s best friend and who taught Vernon to play music, as we learn in the commentary). Watch the commentary, and you will, like me, be continually amazed at the deep gravel of Vernon’s natural speaking voice as you listen, given how ethereal his falsetto resonates throughout the entire Bon Iver catalog.

SABLE, fABLE will get lots of replay into the future around my house. This is a fantastic album, and if it weren’t for three other arguably-even-more-fantastic albums from 2025, this would have been an easy #1. Vernon has been at the top of his game since he started recording music at the end of the twentieth century. Here’s to hoping we get to hear his lovely music for at least the next 25+ years, as well.

^{1. It is impossible for me to separate Bon Iver the band from Justin Vernon, the person. So I will often refer to he/him in the singular even when referring to the band as a whole↩}
^{2. Annoyingly, on the vinyl version of the album, those first four songs, the SABLE side, are split across side A and B on LP1, and are to be played at 45rpm. The rest of the album, the fABLE side, has 9 tracks broken across side C and D on LP2, meant to be played at 33rpm. The mechanical switch between 45rpm and 33rpm necessary to play the album in its entirety takes me out of my element enough to force these two LPs into separate musical realms. Maybe that someone jarring separation was intentional?↩}