Big Thief, to infinity and beyond

It’s a July morning somewhere in California. Adrianne Lenker, 34, Buck Meek, 38, and James Krivchenia, 36, the three members of Big Thief, are sitting on the floor of a room. Three rooms, actually, as each has a small screen on the video call. The purpose of the conversation is to present their new album, Double Infinity, released on September 5. With it, they continue to expand and redefine the unique alt-indie folk sound that made them known six albums ago.

“The other day I went back to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022), our previous album, and for the first time I felt like I was really listening to it. I saw how everything is connected to who we were back then. This record will start speaking to us over time,” says Lenker, in her whispery, sweet voice, as she seems to lie on the floor. She’s wearing a wool hat and looks into the camera as if she could pierce it with her gaze.

“You never really know what an album is about. I remember driving one day and saying to myself, ‘Damn! Why did we have to put all of that on the last record?’” says Krivchenia. “There was a moment when I thought we had emptied ourselves out. But eventually it always happens: we start writing, and soon we have a handful of songs. There’s some kind of gravitational effect that pulls them together. And the album just takes shape.” That gravitational effect, on Double Infinity, also takes the form of a kind of trance. A seven-minute track like No Fear is practically a soundscape.

“In a lot of the songs we recorded, there are 11 people playing at once,” Lenker notes. “And with No Fear, the original cut was 15, and we ended up recording a 45. It was really like entering a trance,” says Meek. They played in a circle, adds Lenker.

“We didn’t give the musicians any special instructions, just the song’s base,” says Krivchenia.

The result is controlled chaos that sounds unlike anything else, something entirely new, according to Lenker, who repeats in a mantra-like fashion a sort of spell about not belonging in No Fear.

It’s in the space created in the studio (the album was recorded entirely live) that Double Infinity grows and frees itself — “we are becoming more and more free in that sense,” and at the same time, “closer to what we thought we could achieve a few years ago,” say Adrianne and James — and takes shape.

“The depth of this album is possible because of its form,” says Lenker. “Art in human beings ultimately depends on its form. It’s the form that makes it powerful. A song has a certain form, an album another. They are forms in themselves. This album was meant to be a cassette tape. Nine songs: that was its only limitation, and in that form, everything else grew. Not putting limits on the musicians has allowed each part to contain the whole, which is incredible.”

He continues: “There’s an explosion of sound on the album, which is somehow represented by the line on the cover, by the inexplicable miracle of nature, and every little thing it contains. It’s an enchanted album; we weren’t controlling it; it took on a life of its own, and that’s why it has that depth — it’s all of our souls, together.”

The singer says profound, abysmally profound, things all the time. She smiles, sits up, leans on a dresser, and allows herself a kind of theoretical, existential disappearance when asked where her songs come from.

“I’m inspired by everything around me. People,” says Lenker. “I think there are poets who don’t know they are. The other day I walked for hours with a neighbor in the woods, and I didn’t realize how much I was making art when he talked about what his life was like 50 years ago. What a depth of self he’d reached and was allowing me to reach too. If you look closely, you can understand everyone around you. Feel what they feel. See them inside. It’s your perceptions that color the world around you. It’s you who everything depends on. There are hidden messages in nature. In the way the clouds move. For me, everything speaks and breathes.”

This year Lenker also released a solo album of 43 tracks, recorded live, called Live At Revolution Hall. Her work outside the band is equally impressive, crucial for understanding the 21st century and the evolution of songwriting in communion with everything that exists, but is unseen by us.

“The idea of Double Infinity really comes from what we don’t know about who we are and where we come from," says Lenker. “What happened before we were born and what will happen after we die. An idea of some kind of infinity, but one we don’t know at all. As human beings, we’re trapped in the present, and we get older. The body ages like a car, or the engine of anything, but your soul senses that there’s something more, coming from one infinity and heading to another. My feeling is that within every molecule there’s an infinite universe. The terrifying thing is that we can’t see how anything ends, or where it begins. Is the place we came from the same place we’re going to? I’m fascinated by the idea of permanence. How do we remain?”

She continues: “The way we present things and represent ourselves within them is also illusory. We create constructs that separate us, but we’re all in the same boat, and we all want the same thing: to be loved and accepted, to belong, to reach that other, higher frequency, where you simply love yourself for who you are. I’ve struggled a lot to love myself that way. It’s very difficult. But you mustn’t stop trying. The goal is to feel at home in your own skin, because every person is precious and special, as are every tree and every river.”

And so is this album, at times luminously hypnotic (Words), deliciously calm post-psychedelia (All Night All Day, with echoes of Stevie Nicks), or simply brilliant (Incomprehensible, Los Angeles), like a spell that can make you disappear for a while (How Could I Have Known) and transport you to another place where, as Lenker puts it, you “discover something different, something you hadn’t seen or heard before.” No, Double Infinity isn’t just one of the albums of the year. At the very least, it’s one of the albums of the decade.

Double Infinity

Big Thief
4AD / Popstock!

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