On Sunday night, at a quarter to nine, a batch of carefully dressed Brooklynites lined up in front of a multipurpose space in Red Hook. It was cold out, pitch-black and starry. Couples shivered as the wind stung their cheeks; they reached into the pockets of their wool coats and Canada Goose parkas, unfolding their printed tickets to Bon Iver. It was the second night of the band’s sold-out five-night run at Pioneer Works, a brick warehouse space with high ceilings and tall windows that describes itself as a “center for research and experimentation in contemporary culture.” (Justin Vernon, the principal member of Bon Iver, is on the board.) Outside, in the garden, a clutch of people huddled over a fire. Inside, the venue was crammed to gridlock. The room holds eighteen hundred people if you pack them like anchovies, and the crowd was near uniform: white thirty-somethings, sparkling with neurosis, sensible and keen.

Bon Iver’s difficult, visionary, and immediately beloved third album, “22, A Million,” came out at the end of September, but the tour for the album consisted of a stretch of West Coast dates in late October, followed by a break. The Pioneer Works shows were the first in New York. (There will be ten New York shows in total, culminating at Music Hall of Williamsburg next Wednesday; each performance sold out right away.) When the night began, a graphic was projected onto the wall behind the stage: a plug for 2 A Billion, Bon Iver’s gender-equity campaign. That projection was swapped for a quote from Louis C.K. about cell-phone usage. “Don’t text or Twitter during the show,” it read. “Just live your life. Don’t keep telling people what you’re doing. Also it lights up your big dumb face.” The crowd clapped, appreciative.

Then, over a mournful instrumental, a monologue began—a man’s voice, reading the words of the Civil War soldier Sullivan Ballou, written to his wife, Sarah, in July of 1861. It was an affecting if heavy-handed prologue—and risked caricature, given Vernon’s anachronistic leanings (“Faces are for friends only,” he told a group of journalists, hoping for photographs, earlier this year) and Bon Iver’s early cabin-in-the-woods fame. The letter went on for so long that I started to giggle with discomfort, and then the voice announced that Ballou died a week after writing it. “Yikes,” the man in front of me said.

The room blazed with light. Bon Iver began the show with “10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠,” a churning, crunchy track from “22, A Million” whose title is styled with characteristic idiosyncrasy. (It rhymes with “Beth/Rest,” the closing track from “Bon Iver, Bon Iver,” a previous album.) I tiptoed, bobbing like a buoy, to see Vernon, front and center; he was wearing a black T-shirt and headphones, and was illuminated by a bright white spotlight, tufts of hair waving from the sides of his head. He was backed by two multi-instrumentalists and two drummers (Vernon’s longtime collaborators Andrew Fitzpatrick, Mike Lewis, Sean Carey, and Matt McCaughan), plus the irregular flares of a horn section. Vernon has lovingly nicknamed the row of saxophones the Sad Sax of Shit.

They played “33 ‘GOD’ ” and then a filled-out version of “Heavenly Father,” a track that Vernon wrote for a Zach Braff movie. The sound was staggering—thrumming and heady, deep and bright. Vernon gave a shout-out to Lonnie Holley, the outsider artist who had opened for him that night, from whom a gorgeous part of “33 ‘GOD’ ”—“all my goodness to show”—is borrowed. The crowd gasped and clapped and stood very still. A woman behind me swooned, literally, and was carried out on a stretcher. A security guard bulldozed through the crowd, following a waft of smoke to the right of me and suggesting that the man holding the joint might want to leave.

Vernon is an odd lyricist. At Pitchfork, Kevin Lozano compared his style to Gertrude Stein’s as characterized by John Ashbery: “annoying or brilliant or tedious.” Vernon does write like a sound poet, manufacturing neologisms like “dedicoding” and “fuckified,” and on his records he’s easy to misunderstand. (The hook of “Flume,” the first track on Bon Iver’s début album, begins with the line “Only love is all maroon,” which I misheard for years as “Lonely love is on the run.”) To add to his natural instinct for obscuration, much of what Vernon sings on “22, A Million” is digitally distorted, filtered through the Messina, an instrument that he created with his engineer. The handful of clearly delivered lyrics on the album come to feel like keys to the rest of the kingdom—fragmentary glimpses of a stranger’s most intimate moments, imbued with a “glistening desperation whose context we can’t quite grasp,” as Hua Hsu wrote in his review.

Live that night, nearly everything Vernon sang carried this heightened, overwhelming immediacy. His voice is shocking even when manipulated—it is so intimate, so fervent, so sure. Even minus his arsenal of sonic alterations, he has an array of voices, and he switches among them with ease. On “715 – CR∑∑KS,” he began softly, approaching each pitch as if he were cresting a hill. The song hardened, grew fierce and desperate, as Vernon tried to wrench his voice away from the harmonies that chase it. And by the final refrain of the song, which is a command (“Turn around, you’re my A-Team”), Vernon had transformed his delivery: each note sounded like water blasted against a wall. On other songs, like “_\__45___,” a delirious riff between Vernon and a saxophone, he was minimal and genteel, bending his voice away from the beat. On “Creature Fear,” he used a straightforward folk affect as a kind of misdirection; the band escalated into a frantic, extended post-rock delirium, and the voice disappeared.

Vernon had announced that he wouldn’t do an encore, and before the final song people started to slip out ahead of the crush. “It’s a school night,” a man who passed me muttered sheepishly. And anyway, Bon Iver’s music is more about the walk home than the communal experience—even if Vernon goes to such lengths to keep the band’s shows small and controlled. He is, by consensus, a genius, and he seems to be protecting his own sincerity against the force of popular adulation. He is faithful at a time when pop feels increasingly faithless, and, remarkably, he has used the tools of this faithless world—over-processing, digital manipulation—to shore up that faith. Still, the tension in his position peeks out in places. As soon as the post-show wave of applause was over, the crowd rushed for the exits, bemoaning the Uber wait times. Behind the merchandise table, there was a Bon Iver bomber jacket for sale. A hundred and twenty-five bucks.