Music

SABLE, - EP Album ∙ Alternative ∙ 2024 Bon Iver Justin Vernon was just a few years removed from self-releasing his now legendary debut—2007’s   For Emma, Forever Ago , recorded in wintry solitude—when he won an actual Grammy Award for its more polished follow-up in 2012. He’d become famous enough to watch his backstory become a punchline and his likeness parodied by Justin Timberlake on   Saturday Night Live . (Timberlake would attempt to borrow the same mystique for his 2018 album,   Man of the Woods .) You can understand why Vernon would want to change the subject for a time. For nearly a decade, he’s obscured some part of himself, hidden behind symbols and numbers, bandannas and bandmates, vocoders and vast collages of bleep and bloop—not to mention a still astonishing list of celebrity collaborators to whom he’s been more than happy to cede the limelight, Taylor Swift chief among them. The three-song   SABLE,   EP is immediately notable because it finds Vern...