Happy 5th Anniversary to Bon Iver’s third studio album 22, A Million, originally released September 30, 2016.
Most people think about the Bon Iver albums as a progression of sounds. They started out folky and acoustic, then built a full band, then got electronic and experimental, and then built a massive collective of people who contributed to a decentered sound. Bing-bang-boom. Narrative, baby.
These kinds of narratives are fun to tell and a lot of the time they have a certain amount of accuracy; the differences between the Bon Iver records are, of course, meaningful and reflective of the band’s creative process. Saying otherwise would be to deny them credit for the creativity that have made them such a fascinating group.
But there’s another way. As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of 22, A Million (2016), the album where some people feel Bon Iver took a hard left turn away from their roots, I want to make the case that this is the album that solidified what we know Bon Iver to be. There are a few defining features of Bon Iver’s longform projects that reach a rarefied place on this very strange, but also very familiar, piece of work—making it their masterpiece.
The first defining feature of Bon Iver is the notion of one long song. Leaving the 2009 EP Blood Bank to the side for the moment, each Bon Iver record has something that extends beyond cohesion. The instrumental experimentation that we see from album to album creates such a defined musical place that the tracks seem inextricably bound together. The songs don’t just use a similar instrumentation—they respond to each other. The start of every Bon Iver song is the answer to the one that came before it.
22, A Million is where this style found its footing. There are brilliant transitions throughout the record (see for example the militaristic drums of “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄” shoving aside the placid opening track), but the highlight of the album is the segue from “21 M◊◊N WATER” to “8(circle).” The former track ends with this one searing, dissonant note, creating a huge sense of tension, before everything starts to float backwards into the closing third of the album.
What makes this truly magical is that “8(circle)” is in a new key, which makes the transition feel like we’re in a brand new place, rather than having resolved any of the tension from “21 M◊◊N WATER.” The soft synths place us in a new tonal world; without any strong instrumentation or a bass note, this new key still feels unstable, like we’re still floating down from that high note at the end of the previous track. In fact, gratification is delayed until the fifth verse, after a break, when the band finally comes back into place. We finally touch ground. “8(circle)” is both its own song (one of the best on the album) and a reaction to the song that came before it. So, when I say that it’s one long song, I mean it.
Something else Bon Iver does quite like nobody else is minimize repetition. Pop music needs reptation in order to be intelligible; Bon Iver uses just enough to be intelligible, but each moment on a Bon Iver record is its own precious spot in time. Few things are repeated the exact same way when the next verse comes around. New instruments, samples, and vocal inflections make the delivery of every idea special—to be treated as its own. The result is that each moment is a mirror of the ones that have come before it—they remind you of each other to have significance as a group, but each is special on its own.
The origin point for this approach is “Woods,” a Blood Bank song that features a simple four-line phrase repeated over the course of four minutes, with an additional voice singing the line in a new way each time. You’ll find similar, albeit more conventional versions of this idea on the self-titled LP Bon Iver (2011), on tracks like “Towers” and “Wash.”
But it’s on 22, A Million, with an expanded electronic palette, that the group was able to double down on surprise. It seems like every moment on 22, A Million has something—a sample, a voice modulation, a new synthesizer—that comes to make it just different enough. Sometimes these additions are unpredictable (like they are on “33 “GOD””) and other times they have a sense of unity and momentum to them that drive the song forward (see “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄””). The new sound gave them a way to do something that they had been doing all along—it’s not so much a departure as it is a way of embracing a fundamental part of the band’s character.
And perhaps most importantly, every Bon Iver record aches. They all ache in different ways and for different reasons, but each one is somehow about feeling small, and sometimes helpless, in a world where bad things happen. On 22, A Million, all of these new and broken sounds make something that’s hard to make out on the first couple of listens, but after spending time with it, you realize that this is the best way to express these feelings. When the sound dips into its closing suite of three songs, which feature much less noise, the feeling of peace is almost painful—such is the process of reconciling that you cannot control everything. “It harms me, it harms me, it harms me. I let it in.”
The point here is that even though 22, A Million sounds like a puzzle, and it’s fun to treat it as one by diving into all of the different sounds and effects, it is at its core an album meticulously crafted to realize the aesthetic and emotional vision that Bon Iver has been putting forward since the cabin in Wisconsin. It’s not the moment the band jumped the shark—it’s the moment they reached their peak.
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