Bon Iver Announces 22, A Million (10th Anniversary Edition)

Primarily recorded and produced at Justin Vernon's April Base in Wisconsin, with bits and pieces tracked in London and just outside of Lisbon, 22, A Million was formed at the congruence of friends old and new, turning hundreds of hours of improvisations, proto-melodies, vague textures and specific moods into something bold, delicate and now unmistakable. "22, A Million sounds only like itself," said Pitchfork in 2016, later naming it one of the Best Albums of the 2010s. "It feels truly singular. Its searching is bottomless."

Part love letter, part final resting place of two decades spent seeking self-understanding like a religion - and the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding - these 10 songs are a collection of sacred moments, love's torment and salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or disregard as coincidence. Beginning with a reminder of our fragile existence ("it might be over soon"), it's an album about holding on to what's important and making sense of the events that rip us apart. More than anything, however, it's an album about the power of human connection through music.

"It takes a particular commitment to ambitiously pursue the visual work in the same breath as the music itself," opens Eric Timothy Carlson, in his accompanying essay for 22, A Million (10th Anniversary Edition). Throughout the songs we encounter a collection of numerical relationships - binary code, mystic ages, Bible chapters, math-logic, repeating infinities - and inside these numbers are a sonic distillation of imagery describing positionality ("Down along the creek," "In the stair up off the hot car lot"), strategies ("I'd make myself escape," "Steal and rob it"), situations ("Carrying his guitar," "Sent your sister home in a cab"), new lexicon ("Astuary King," "Wandry," "Paramind"), temporalities ("The math ahead, the math behind," "It might be over soon") and recurring visuals ("Five lane divers").

These words reveal a riddle of dualities, and within 22, A Million (10th Anniversary Edition), Carlson writes, "The songs were born as numbers, initially an unsettled numerology that calcified over time as the songs came into their own. The idea was to find an icon to hold each track. The Western Arabic numerals were to remain intact yet asked to be realized as unique forms, ligatures, glyphs, and monograms." In one short excerpt, he remembers:

"Roughly a year after we started working together, I met with Justin at a small bar in New York where he first told me the album title, 22, A Million. 22 being a lucky number or a self-portrait, while a million could stand in as a practically sized 'everybody.' There's an inherent balance to the number 22, two twos. I drew the repeating forms on a bar napkin in ballpoint pen, inverting the second numeral and nestling it within the baseline foundation of the former. The result evoked the spiral of a yin yang or chain link; an entanglement; a lightning bolt; trust; a locking mechanism; a divided self; a moment of refection; a reputation; an I and you; a we; a part of the whole."

22, A Million (10th Anniversary Edition) Tracklist

22 (OVER S∞∞N)

10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⚄ ⚄

715 - CR∑∑KS

33 "GOD"

29 #Strafford APTS

666 ʇ

21 M◊◊N WATER

8 (circle)

____45_____

00000 Million

Praise For 22, A Million

" Its songs take the cryptic introspection of [Bon Iver]'s previous work into even more convoluted realms. Yet somehow, something comes through all the multitracking: a yearning, a compulsion to explore, a vulnerable heart within "

The New York Times, Best Albums of 2016

"One of the strangest and most beautiful records I've ever heard "

The New Yorker

" A myth-busting creative rebirth "

Rolling Stone, Best Albums of The 2010s

" There's an unabashedly gonzo energy to [22, A Million]…But by the time you hit the tangled saxophones and processed choirs of '___45___,' there's no doubting the album's fundamental sincerity "

Pitchfork, Best Albums of The 2010s

" 22, A Million maintains and even enhances the intimacy of Bon Iver's debut. It's a scuffed jewel: more beautiful for its lived-in exterior, while still exquisite at its core "

NPR Music, Best Albums of 2016

" For all its undoubted oddness, what's striking about the album is how straightforwardly enjoyable it is…It's fantastic "

The Guardian, Best Albums of 2016

" The deconstructed cyborg hymns of22, A Million are as gorgeous as anything in the Bon Iver oeuvre "

Stereogum, Best Albums of The 2010s

" Gasping, disorienting, and, at times, angry. It's not the Bon Iver album anyone could have predicted. It's better "

Complex, Best Albums of 2016

" [22, A Million] is a form of understanding something that there is no real way to understand…This is as deep of a level as I ever engaged with any single piece of music "

The FADER, Albums That Made Albums Matter Again in 2016

" What was initially perceived as a radical abandonment of lush folk was actually a heightening of the technical explorations beneath those softer moments…the unapologetic audacity of it all forced listeners to pull down any walls their expectations had built "

Consequence, Top Albums of The 2010s