Bon Iver looks toward the light on new album Sable, Fable

The Grammy Award-winning band Bon Iver is releasing their first album in six years, Sable, Fable.

Bon Iver is an American indie folk band that, over the last 19 years, has influenced the worlds of mainstream pop, rap, R&B, country music and indie rock. They're best known for their melodic and often melancholic alternative albums — but notably on Sable, Fable, lead singer Justin Vernon gives hope a try.

Today on Commotion, music critics Emilie Hanskamp and Matthew Ismael Ruiz join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to share their thoughts on the new music, and explain how Bon Iver transcended underground folk hero status to become one of the most important artists of the 21st century.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: The vibes are very different around here. Look, Sable, Fable comes out Friday. We have seven of the 13 tracks out already. Emilie, the idea that you get a chorus from Bon Iver that says, "Damn if I'm not climbing up a tree right now, and everything is peaceful love, and right in me." I'm like, what is happening? Tell me about everything you've heard from this album so far.

Emilie: First of all, we've heard too much. Can artists stop putting out half their albums before they drop the album? But my inner millennial is confused to hear Justin Vernon earnestly saying "everything is peaceful love." I'm happy for the man, you know? It's like for over 15 years your beautiful friend has just had this darkness following them around. Finally, the clouds are parting…. We just want happiness for him. Finally, he has happiness. So there is that part of me.

But Elamin, there's another part of me that thinks about this story he told where the peak of his anxiety and his sadness, the overwhelm of the pressure of Bon Iver, he's out on stage. He starts crying, and he notices the crowd is, like, screaming. They're going wild for his sadness, and he clocks it like, "They're enjoying this." This has always been our relationship with him; his tragedies are art. So I'm very curious to see — and it's an adjustment period for me — how do we respond to this new, joyful, jubilant Bon Iver? It's gonna take some time, for me.

Elamin: Yeah, the idea of a jubilant Bon Iver is a lot to take in. Matthew, Sable, Fable is broken into two parts. There's Sable and there's Fable. In terms of doing what he needs to do to be happy right now, Matthew, how is that coming out in the music we've heard from Sable and Fable?

Matthew: I mean, I definitely see that. The track that jumped out at me from the jump is Awards Season. It kind of links to a moment in his career where he's ostensibly at his critical, commercial peak, and he feels that intense pressure to the point where what other artists might take as a springboard to next-level mainstream success, he's like, I gotta step back. This is too much. And so you can get a peek into the anxiety that comes with a moment like that from someone who is as introspective as him, who carries that yearning — that type of person that would need to retreat to a cabin to go explore their feelings on record, right?

And then transitioning into the second half, I do feel just a little bit of the freedom he may be experiencing right now: achieving the peace in a sense of not necessarily feeling the pressure one way or the other, of being able to be like, "I've had this career where people might have applied a particular narrative to me, but I also have expressed myself in many different ways." And he's using a lot of those tools in understated ways that show this is an artist that doesn't feel like he has to prove anything to us.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman.