The first album in six years from Justin Vernon, the man who made snowbound isolation into a thing of conceptual artistry and beauty (Bon Iver = bon hiver = French for ‘good winter’), comes freighted with a sense of an ending. Not to mention a freewheeling approach to punctuation and typography. SABLE fABLE is billed as ‘the epilogue’ on a ‘project’ that began, 18 years past, with For Emma, Forever Ago. That debut record began as Vernon recovered from a bout of mononucleosis hepatitis in his dad’s cabin in the Wisconsin wilderness. This was broken folk music where the songs were as fractured as the protagonist’s heart, Vernon’s yearning realised in a bewitching, keening falsetto.

Over three subsequent albums, Vernon roamed near (2011’s self-titled second album was also recorded in Wisconsin, in an old vet’s clinic that Vernon turned into April Base Studios), far (2016’s 22, A Million introduced a kaleidoscope of electronic and hip-hop influences), wild (he perfected the vocoded vocal, turning it into a form of lovelorn speaking-in-tongues) and wonky (he worked with Kanye West). And now, finally, seemingly, an endpoint of sorts.  

This fifth album, recorded at the reopened April Base after years of renovations, opens with last autumn’s EP Sable. It’s represented here in its entirety (including the 12-second, high-pitched tone titled ‘…’ and with first full track ‘THINGS BEHIND THINGS BEHIND THINGS’ setting the scene. Over skipping, fluttering, cardiac beats, picked guitar and mantric, repeated lines, Vernon casts himself as a man adrift and awry: ‘I would like the feeling, I would like the feeling, I would like the feeling gone/Cause I don’t like the way it’s, I don’t like the way it’s, I don’t like the way it’s looking.’

Then comes ‘SPEYSIDE’. Despite being another bit of geographical misdirection (like second-album track ‘Perth’, it’s not about ‘our’ version of those locations), it does sound like a Scottish folk song: acoustic guitar, fiddle, woodsy vocals, and lyrics full of regret, reproach and self-loathing. Then, a final testimony: ‘AWARDS SEASON’ is part a cappella open-heart surgery, about romantic endings and beginnings, mournful sax rushing in to amplify the torment. After that sepia-toned intro, and a palate-cleansing, composure-gathering, 30-odd seconds pause, we’re into the subsequent nine songs albeit hardly off to the races: Vernon is not a man to be rushed, emotionally or in terms of BPM. But we are off into a kaleidoscopic romance, the quietly blossoming production colouring Justin’s journey.

The song titled ‘From’ has the lush textures of West Coast 1970s production, Steely Dan with beards. ‘Everything Is Peaceful Love’ is a glorious, silkily seductive soul song. The chipmunk introductory vocals on ‘Walk Home’ presage a horny slow-jam. Vernon describes it as ‘a romp where you can’t wait to pull your clothes off fast enough and jump inside bed with your one true lover’, which is certainly another kind of geographical misdirection for a song that’s sluggish sounding, if no less mesmerising. ‘If Only I Could Wait’ is an atmospheric, desperate duet with Danielle Haim, and here, at least, Vernon is on point in his description: ‘a bilateral crying question. How long can the two of us hang on to each other?’

Amid all the narrative hokey-cokey, and the playful use of silences and ellipses and ALL CAPS thematic shouting, there are, too, songs that are simply utterly beautiful. The penultimate ‘There’s A Rhythmn’ is a comforting country-gospel lament, and the final ‘Au Revoir’ is 122 seconds of minimal, ambient comedown. If SABLE fABLE is a mic drop, it’s one that has found glory in the torrid torture of love.

SABLE, fABLE is released by Jagjaguwar on Friday 11 April.