Bon Iver

Bon Iver is releasing VOLUMES: ONE on April 3, a live archival album drawn from concert recordings made between 2019 and 2023 with the six-piece band. It’s the kind of release that a band makes when they have something in the vaults worth preserving, and Bon Iver’s live performances from this period have been widely regarded as some of the most ambitious and emotionally powerful shows they’ve ever played.

Justin Vernon’s project has always existed in a complicated relationship between studio precision and live performance. The records, especially For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver, are built with such careful attention to texture and arrangement that translating them to a live context required creative solutions rather than direct replication. The band that emerged in the 2019-2023 period, a six-piece ensemble, found those solutions.

What the band was doing in this period: expanding the palette of earlier albums into something more physical and improvisational, letting the electronic elements breathe differently in live context, trusting the room to shape the experience in ways the studio can’t. The recordings that are now becoming VOLUMES: ONE capture that, and the title suggests there may be more volumes to follow.

Vernon has been doing other things since the last Bon Iver studio album, including collaborations under the PEOPLE umbrella and work with other artists. A live archival release is a particular kind of statement about what a band values, which is that the live moments matter enough to be preserved and shared rather than left in the archive.

VOLUMES: ONE is out April 3.