It is 2009, and Justin Vernon is the rising indie-rock star of the moment. His debut album as Bon Iver, 2007’s For Emma, Forever Ago, has fixed an irresistible origin story in the minds of anyone who cares about bearded avant-folk musicians. Once more for the record: Guy with a broken heart retreats to the Wisconsin northwoods, dumps his pain into a collection of impressionistic and achingly beautiful songs, and then becomes kind of famous and highly successful. But the song that would truly map out his future — as well as influence the sound of popular music in the next decade — hasn’t been released yet.

As Vernon would later recall to the New York Times, his most radical and prescient experiment of this period was laid out before he released For Emma. “I made that sketch in North Carolina in an afternoon,” he said of “Woods,” a gut-busting holler of pathos and loneliness twisted into an arrestingly strange alien bleat by Vernon’s unconventional use of Autotune. In time, “Woods” would inform the evolution of indie and pop music, in which technology once associated with glossy Top 40 music is repurposed by a new generation to create sounds that, counterintuitively, evoke raw, primal emotionalism.

For Vernon, “Woods” would also be his entree into the world of Kanye West, who sampled the song on “Lost In The World,” from 2010’s landmark My Beautiful Twisted Fantasy LP. The association with West instantly put Vernon on a different strata of musical celebrity. By the time of the second Bon Iver album, Bon Iver, Bon Iver, Vernon was already well on his way to becoming a signature indie-rocker of his generation, the rare artist in that field who headlines arenas and commingles with some of the biggest pop acts in the world.

Any review of this progression is incomplete without a thorough consideration of the crucial transitional work that came out between those first two Bon Iver albums. Released in early 2009, the Blood Bank EP includes just four tracks recorded around the time of the debut LP. At first glance, it seemed like a typical outtakes release intended to tide over a ravenous fanbase anxious for a new full-length record. But anyone who dug into Blood Bank quickly learned that it was something entirely more momentous.

Revisiting Blood Bank now, it might very well be the most representative work of Vernon’s entire career, touching on what he did in the late aughts while also mapping out where he was headed for the next decade and beyond. A new anniversary reissue out today, which doubles the length of Blood Bank with live versions of each song, reiterates its musical and historical importance in the story of Bon Iver.

“Woods,” which concluded the original Blood Bank on an outrageous and potentially contentious note, remains the most famous track here. In 2009, it seemed like a deliberate provocation, a distancing maneuver creating space between Vernon and the crushingly earnest hoards who were over-eager to crown him as the new king of “authentic” folk rock. After all, what better way to scandalize those people than to brazenly wield the sonic signifier of the very pop music Vernon was supposedly pitted against?

It’s obvious now that “Woods” in fact points toward much of Vernon’s work in the ’10s, in particular his fascination with pure expressive sound above straight-forward songwriting. On paper, “Woods” uses the same cabin-bound imagery of For Emma, likening emotional desolation with the physical isolation of being stranded in winter in the middle of a boundless, barren landscape. (“I’m lost in the woods” is a lyric that could’ve been inserted into any song from For Emma.) But musically, “Woods” manifests the sensation of deep psychic pain, in which the trappings of modernity are rubbed raw until they disintegrate like busted circuitry in your eardrums.