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 Vernon running it back, returning to the sound and feel that launched his career, singing in the first person. It’s a deliberate move away from the maximalist collage of 2019’s i, i. “When I made this song, I was feeling a lot of guilt,” he told an Eras Tour audience of 90,000 at Wembley Stadium in 2022, before playing “S P E Y S I D E”, a song that sounds here as though it could have been lifted from the For Emma sessions—just him and his guitar and his hurt, his falsetto slicing through a layer of strings. “I know that I can’t make good,” he sings. “How I wish I could.” On “AWARDS SEASON”, all you hear for its first and final minutes is Vernon’s voice amid a mist of ambient synth. There is nowhere to hide. “What was pain now’s gained,” he sings. “You know what is great? Nothing stays the same.”