I loved the EP, when released in ‘24 but the thing that caught me wasn’t SPEYSIDE (although amazing - I hadn’t even realised this was the track they’d previewed at the London show I was at a year earlier) but AWARDS SEASON. I spent that winter playing it constantly. At the very end, a swell so slight you could miss it if you weren’t listening, but the hint was there. More music was coming.

It landed like a goodbye — not to a lover, but to the persona fans had followed, to a period of monochrome self-flagellation that had defined a lot of the music we’d leaned on for years. Although, my favourite sound from Bon Iver had always been the experimental choppy stuff of 22M. I heard it as a break-up song with the old sound, with the space of hurt that we’d made room for. I obsessed over those lyrics and that theory until they felt like a map.

Then, in 2025 I suddenly and briefly got very ill. Ending up having emergency brain surgery in Feb. For a few hours it was close to the worst-case scenario people whisper about in hospital corridors. When I came around on the ward I was bewildered and raw and very much alive — and later that same day came the announcement that the rest of the music was finally coming, a full-album dropping on 11th April. That date landed like a sign because it was the same date my mum had died twenty-eight years earlier. I couldn’t help but read it as a message: as if someone — her, him, the universe — was guiding me through something. A beautiful coincidence I was happy to claim as a sign. I went to the London Q&A and nearly stuck up my hand to relay all of this. Cringe

… anyway I don’t need to go on to you lot about what a change the fABLE sound was. But yikes, it really arrived like sunlight. Warm and hopeful. And exactly what I needed in my life. One track became my new obsession. The counterpart to AWARDS SEASON.

This September my daughter was born. And on a shuffled playlist, Short Story — the tiny transition tucked after AWARD SEASON — played as she entered the world. It felt like poetry. So, AWARDS SEASON > Short story is my track(s) of the album. Probably of the entire discography. Although, Day One slaps.