Big Thief open their doors to joy with ‘Double Infinity’

Big Thief began recording Double Infinity in complete isolation in the woods, but the folk-rock trio found the technique that had been working for them for nearly a decade felt stagnant. In the wake of the departure of their former bassist, Max Oleartchik, due to “interpersonal reasons”, Adrienne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krichevna sought a new approach. Going against their initial impulse for forest isolation, they recorded in a studio in New York, reporting to The Independent that they decided to “open up the doors and bring in a big community of people that we admire”.

Double Infinity is just this: an album with its doors thrown open. It is not just the collaborations with artists such as the New Age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji that have expanded Big Thief’s sonic landscape. Their lyricism has adopted a joy and looseness stronger than ever. In ‘Grandmother,’ the first song that the band has co-written, Lenker muses about the ephemerality of dancing at a bar “knowing soon there’ll be no bar,” but loosens her grasp, accepting impermanence: “what’s the use of holding? / It’s unfolding”. As Lenker holds feelings up to the light of time, they lose their weight. In ‘Incomprehensible,’ Lenker concludes that turning 33 “doesn’t really matter / Next to eternity”.

Big Thief’s doors are open to new experiences, musical and personal, but also to allow the past to leave without clinging to it

In their previous albums, Lenker and Meek’s guitars are often the most prominent instruments, but they fade to the background in much of Double Infinity. Instead, Meek explained to Vulture that they wanted “constant liquid sonic elements”. Their instrumentation mimics their lyrical focus on the fluidity of time. Laraaji’s “intuitive vocal melodies,” drones from a zither, and iPad patches in ‘Grandmother’ make the song a free-flowing river, letting love and loss simultaneously float by. The increasingly jubilant chorus, “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll” turns it into an anthem of radical acceptance. Big Thief’s doors are open to new experiences, musical and personal, but also to allow the past to leave without clinging to it.

The radical acceptance in Double Infinity’s lyrics read like a maturation of Big Thief’s previous albums. In ‘Spud Infinity’ from their 2022 Album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Lenker asks “What’s it gonna take? / To free the celestial body?” Whereas there, the repetitions sound more like pleading, the repetitive mantras of Double Infinity are no longer questions, but statements. In ‘All Night All Day’, love and the body are freed: “No beauty shackle or shame / Is banished here”. In ‘Happy With You,’ she plainly states “I’m Happy with you / Why do I need to explain myself?”. This relatively simple lyricism is also found in ‘No Fear’, leaving space for the instruments to breathe. The interwoven textures of synths, bass line, and consistent percussion creates a hypnotic rhythm as Lenker sings iterations of the haiku-like lyrics, “There is no time / Round like a lime / Destiny”. As Mikey Buishas loops this lyric the overlapping vocals sonically resemble the cover art of the album, a lime with two rinds overlapping it, a double infinity.

You can almost see the end credits rolling on a coming of age film, a sunset in the background

In the music video for ‘Words’, Krichevna struggles to write, holding a comically large pencil as it sets on fire and turns into drumsticks. ‘Words’ touches the limits of language but doesn’t mourn it – Lenker sings “Words won’t make it / Right” as a guitar solo energetically searches for an answer. In ‘Los Angeles’ laughter decorates the background of the track. In every song, you can hear the community involved in their recording process, as though the album was produced around a campfire instead of a recording studio in a Manhattan winter. If words won’t make it right, togetherness will.    

It is apt that the lyrics of Double Infinity sound like the wise grandmother of their previous albums, because this is how Big Thief’s ecosystem works. Their songs grow and unfold in tandem with their lives, meaning their lyrics mature with them. All members have extensive solo projects, but they always come back together. Krichevna explained to The Independent that when Big Thief reunites they’re bringing back “songs, that we collect, though our musical endeavours…there’s so much to catch up on that just feeds into the band”. Their collective memories become tied together into a mystical show and tell.

Big Thief is a testament to enduring relationships through adversity. It has survived through the marriage and divorce of Lenker and Meek, and now the departure of Oleartchik. ‘How Could I Have Known,’ the last track, is reminiscent of their previous guitar-heavy albums. It speaks to the power of relationships; “They say everything lives and dies / But our love will live forever”. You can almost see the end credits rolling on a coming of age film, a sunset in the background.

Listen to Double Infinity here: