It comes alongside a whole merchandise line featuring the colour, which includes mugs, notebooks, keyboards and tote bags
By Laura Molloy 22nd November 2025
Bon Iver. CREDIT: Ben Gabbe/Getty Images for The New Yorker
Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon has launched a “new colour” with Pantone.
- READ MORE: Bon Iver – ‘SABLE fABLE’ review: a creative rebirth
The fifth Bon Iver record, ‘SABLE, fABLE’, was released in April via Jagjaguwar, which Vernon produced with Jim-E Stack at his own April Base Studio in Wisconsin, and it has gone on to pick up a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album.
AdvertisementThe record’s artwork featured a shade of orange that has now been dubbed ‘fABLE Salmon’ by Pantone.
“I’ve always thought about how, underneath our skin, no matter what the pigment is, it’s this kind of salmon-belly colour when it gets cut open,” Vernon said in a statement. “I’ve always thought about the humanity of it…SABLE is darkness — and the choice to go into the darkness. It’s solitary. It’s pressing the bruise. It’s self-martyrdom and sadness. fABLE represents a new me, with new flesh for a new healthy, happy person.”
Pantone has launched a whole merchandise line featuring the colour, which includes mugs, notebooks, keyboards and tote bags. Vernon added: “Every band, punk or pop, is in a commercial, capitalist space. Old punk bands were the best brand-builders of all time. Black Flag has the best logo ever. I was like, ‘Let’s lean into that.'”
Check it out below.
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In a four-star review of ‘SABLE, fABLE’, NME commended the album which was feared to be the departure of the Bon Iver project, but instead is being seen as a “rebirth”.
It reads: “Though this is not Bon Iver’s answer to ‘Brat’ summer by any stretch of the imagination, many of these same existential questions also linger on ‘SABLE, fABLE’ – a record that grapples with his own identity as much as it does the twists and turns of life. Though some fans feared this might well be an epilogue to the Bon Iver project, it comes across as more of a rebirth.”
Recently, Vernon said he would be “very surprised” if he ever makes another full-length album after ‘SABLE, fABLE’.
Last month, he also featured on the new Haim song ‘Tie You Down’, from the group’s deluxe edition of their latest album ‘I Quit’.
AdvertisementAmong Bon Iver’s fans is Tom Hiddleston, who told NME earlier this year: “He just has this ability to write joyful music that has a strain of melancholy, and it sounds like he’s discovered a secret that we all knew but forgot about. He’s got an extraordinary gift.”
