{"id":117441,"date":"2025-09-03T19:13:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T19:13:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/117441\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T19:13:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T19:13:08","slug":"big-thief-think-bigger-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/117441\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Thief Think Bigger Than Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tEarly in the sixth album from Big Thief<\/a>, the band\u2019s singer-\u00adsongwriter, Adrianne Lenker, misses a flight. For most of us, this wouldn\u2019t be \u00adanything but a hassle. She turns it into a dream: \u201cDriving with my lover,\u201d she sings against distant guitar shimmer and agile, circular drumming, \u201cWe added up the hours\/To see the lupine flowers\/Way up past the border\/We blew through Thunder Bay.\u201d The song spirals into a beautiful meditation on memory, time, family, aging, and freedom that\u2019s at once casually philosophical, wisely ironic, funny, sad, resilient \u2014 and poignantly titled \u201cIncomprehensible,\u201d a phrase she repeats like an awe-\u00adinspired mantra as the song fades. That\u2019s a lot to encompass in a four-minute indie-rock tune. But Big Thief have always been a band that likes to travel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThey\u2019ve become one of the most beloved bands of the 2020s because of moments like this, songs grounded in folk music\u2019s 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\u2019s last album, 2022\u2019s 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 \u2014 the perfect antidote to Covid-era isolation. At the heart of everything they do has always been Lenker\u2019s highly poetic songwriting, which hit a new intimate peak on her 2024 solo acoustic album, Bright Future.<\/p>\n

\n\tDouble Infinity is their first LP as a trio \u2014 Lenker, Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia, plus longtime producer Dom Monks. It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tOn \u201cWords,\u201d 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 \u2014 \u201cWords are tired and tense\/Words don\u2019t make sense,\u201d Lenker sings, her voice rendered a quavering echo as if she\u2019s falling into the music. The Neil Youngian country-\u00adrock tune \u201cLos Angeles\u201d 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. \u201cWe dream our dreams together\/Even without laying in the same bed,\u201d she sings.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tThe album\u2019s live-in-the-studio real-time creative texture makes for an immersive listen, and sometimes a surprising one. With a smooth soulful groove, \u201cAll Night All Day\u201d feels closer to R&B than rock, with Lenker delivering a viscerally impassioned hymn-like ode to romance that opens with \u201cAll night, all day, I could go down on you\/Hear you sing your pleasure,\u201d and continues with \u201cYou scratch my skin to help me feel\/\u2019Cause I ask you to.\u201d The title track is a sublime slow-core power ballad, a hymn to beauty in a world of chaos. \u201cNo Fear\u201d crawls along for seven miasmic minutes \u2014 it sounds a little like if Low did a blues-rock record with Daniel Lanois. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe album\u2019s sweetest moment is \u201cGrandmother,\u201d 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 \u201cGonna turn it all into rock & roll.\u201d They make grandma-\u00adrock into a hell of a genre \u2014 another new-old look from a band that keeps making history.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Early in the sixth album from Big Thief, the band\u2019s singer-\u00adsongwriter, Adrianne Lenker, misses a flight. For most…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[64260,49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-117441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-big-thief","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}