Early in the sixth album from Big Thief, the band’s singer-songwriter, Adrianne Lenker, misses a flight. For most of us, this wouldn’t be anything but a hassle. She turns it into a dream: “Driving with my lover,” she sings against distant guitar shimmer and agile, circular drumming, “We added up the hours/To see the lupine flowers/Way up past the border/We blew through Thunder Bay.” The song spirals into a beautiful meditation on memory, time, family, aging, and freedom that’s at once casually philosophical, wisely ironic, funny, sad, resilient — and poignantly titled “Incomprehensible,” a phrase she repeats like an awe-inspired mantra as the song fades. That’s a lot to encompass in a four-minute indie-rock tune. But Big Thief have always been a band that likes to travel.
They’ve become one of the most beloved bands of the 2020s because of moments like this, songs grounded in folk music’s rustic beauty and freewheeling honesty that are also spacious sound-worlds. They started out as a promising band in the mid-2010s, with influences like Rilo Kiley and Crazy Horse, and hit a peak with the 2019 album U.F.O.F., with Lenker and guitarist Buck Meek creating pastoral acoustic weaves that could suggest a shoegaze John Fahey. Big Thief’s last album, 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, was a wide-roaming 20-song collection that felt like overhearing a creative community in full bloom — the perfect antidote to Covid-era isolation. At the heart of everything they do has always been Lenker’s highly poetic songwriting, which hit a new intimate peak on her 2024 solo acoustic album, Bright Future.
Double Infinity is their first LP as a trio — Lenker, Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia, plus longtime producer Dom Monks. It’s the product of long periods of improvisation and features a host of collaborators, who join in on everything from live tape loops to keys to zither. The finished product is just nine songs, but the band covers a ton of ground, both in terms of what it comes up with musically as well as the distance Lenker traverses in her writing.
On “Words,” she sings about the struggle to communicate in a relationship; the song starts out as a buoyant folk-pop jam jaunt, upbeat enough to soundtrack a hacky-sack circle in a 1990s college quad, and then immediately gets weirder, darker, noisier, and woozier — “Words are tired and tense/Words don’t make sense,” Lenker sings, her voice rendered a quavering echo as if she’s falling into the music. The Neil Youngian country-rock tune “Los Angeles” is about a relationship that stays tight despite time and distance. The scene shifts from a lonely L.A. night to Park Avenue in New York and then to the Grand Canyon, as Lenker follows the chords of memory to the point where they reconnect. “We dream our dreams together/Even without laying in the same bed,” she sings.
The album’s live-in-the-studio real-time creative texture makes for an immersive listen, and sometimes a surprising one. With a smooth soulful groove, “All Night All Day” feels closer to R&B than rock, with Lenker delivering a viscerally impassioned hymn-like ode to romance that opens with “All night, all day, I could go down on you/Hear you sing your pleasure,” and continues with “You scratch my skin to help me feel/’Cause I ask you to.” The title track is a sublime slow-core power ballad, a hymn to beauty in a world of chaos. “No Fear” crawls along for seven miasmic minutes — it sounds a little like if Low did a blues-rock record with Daniel Lanois.
The album’s sweetest moment is “Grandmother,” a collaboration with New Age artist Laraaji. Lenker digs into a well of memories, conflicted feelings, and epiphanies, addressing her mother and grandmother, and apologizing to a lover, before landing on the refrain “Gonna turn it all into rock & roll.” They make grandma-rock into a hell of a genre — another new-old look from a band that keeps making history.
From Rolling Stone US
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
