SABLE, “almost started to become a cartoon of sad Bon Iver music,” Vernon told The New York Times last month. “I like the songs a lot, but they were kind of these last moments, the last gasping breath of my former self that really did feel bad for himself.

Bon Iver were at the vanguard of the indie-folk boom of the late 2000s, just as the world economy turned to bust. That was when Fleet Foxes’s beatific roots-rock went platinum, Mumford & Sons started jangling their infernal banjos, and music writers toggled between the use of “rambunctious” and “hymnal” in effusive reviews.