Next month Bon Iver will release its first album in five years. Cause for celebration: 22, A Million. Justin Vernon and the band have today released another track from the album in the form of the lyric video for 33 “GOD.” Check it out below with all its sub rosa semaphores and voltaic gesticulations. Vernon has always been lyrically cryptic, taking pages from the early-Stipe bible, but 22, A Million sets the shroud-bar even higher. With music this compelling and Vernon’s emotional vocal commitment, however, we remain happy to play along at home.

For those also playing along at home, there are a smattering of clues dropped along the way. The video opens with an epigraph from Psalm 22: “Why are you so FAR from saving me.” And there’s this from the “biography” of the album penned by Trever Hagen: “If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces, then 22, A Million is the letting go of that attachment to a place. ‘I’m taking deeper consideration in another kind of place–our friendships and connections to other people.’ Justin proclaims this shift in ’33 “GOD”’: ‘These will just be places to me now’. Rather than places we encounter a collection of numerical relationships: binary code, mystic ages, Bible chapters, math-logic, repeating infinities.” Others might argue that the title references Jesus Christ’s assumed age at death (though it could merely have referenced Vernon’s age two years ago). The song also includes cool Paolo Nutini and Lonnie Holley clues (check the latter out at bottom).

Below the lyric video you can also listen to a live version that Bon Iver debuted at Justin Vernon’s Eaux Claires Music Festival a few weeks back.

33 “GOD”:

“(When we leave this room it’s gone)
Is the company stalling?
We had what we wanted: your eyes
(When we leave this room it’s gone)
With no word from the former
I’d be happy as hell, if you stayed for tea
(I know so well that this is all there is)
This is how we grow now, woman
A child ignored
These will just be places to me now
The foreman is down
(When we leave this room it’s gone)
We’re rising the stairs

I find God and religion too
Staying at the Ace Hotel
If the calm would allow
Then I would just be floating to you now
It would make me pass to let it pass on
I’m climbing the dash, that skin

(Here in this room, this narrow room where life began when we were young last night)

Well we walked up on that bolt in the street
After you tied me in the driveway of the apartment of his bede
Sent your sister home in a cab
Said I woulda walked across any thousand lands
(No not really if you can’t)
I didn’t need you that night
Not gonna need you anytime
Was gonna take it as it goes
I could go forward in the light
Well I better fold my clothes

Oh my goodness
Oh my goodness to show”