While some songs hit like sunscreen in the eyes, others drift in like a popsicle drip on your wrist — unexpected, a little sticky and totally unforgettable. The kind of tunes you stumble into on a sun-baked afternoon when time slows and shoes come off. Bon Iver’s SABLE, fABLE is exactly that — a summer soundtrack of barefoot truths and golden-hour feelings cast in warm falsetto and cicada harmony.

If For Emma, Forever Ago was the sound of winter heartbreak and i,i the autumn of inner reckoning, then this is a lush and beautiful summer bloom — an album that glows like golden-hour fireflies on the longest day of the year. It is equal parts campfire confession, polaroid dream and sonic lemonade stand.

Side A offers the shade of canopy trees and tender nostalgia. Tracks like “Things Behind Things Behind Things” and “Awards Season” blow in gently like the sway of a lazy hammock between memory and mystery.

Side B arrives like a dip in the pool — sudden, refreshing and impossibly alive. “Everything Is Peaceful Love” is a sunbeam you can dance to, unguarded and wide-eyed. “Walk Home” feels like riding a bike with no hands — wind in your shirt, nowhere to be. And Dijon and Flock of Dimes bring their backyard lawn-chair warmth to “Day One.”

SABLE, fABLE feels recorded in a treehouse — still Bon Iver, but here it breathes differently. It exhales. Not the loud summer, but the quiet one: butterflies over tall grass, long drives, the scent of rain on hot pavement. It doesn’t just soundtrack summer — it is summer.

– Chris Rucker