Album Review: Big Thief, ‘Double Infinity’ – Our Culture

Big Thief find themselves at a creative crossroads. Or, as Adrianne Lenker more poetically puts it on the title track of their new album, Double Infinity: “At the bridge of two infinities/ What’s been lost and what lies waiting.” Recorded at New York’s Power Station Studios, the LP accordingly doesn’t sound like moving on so much as between those vast emotional points, with many of Lenker’s meditations on love reflecting the band’s own disorientation following the departure bassist Max Oleartchik (for “interpersonal reasons,” they insist, though some conversations were definitely had about his relationship to his hometown of Tel Aviv.) It is their first album as a trio, but Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia’s attempts at recording as one were initially fruitless, so they enlisted a small circle of collaborators that translate the undercurrent of confusion into a sweet, gauzy veil of textures, marrying Lenker’s increasingly mantra-like lyrics with loops, samples, and wordless backing vocals, as well as zither contributions from ambient luminary Laraaji. It is ambient in spirit, if not necessarily in sound. Where words fail, it insists, music – for the most part – doesn’t.

1. Incomprehensible

Adrianne Lenker meditates on the inexplicably sweet nature of ageing, tuning into her body to challenge the ways we’re socialized into experiencing the changes. “The message spirals, don’t get saggy, don’t get gray/ But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulder,” she sings, looking to the generations of women before her that “wrinkle like the river, sweeten like the dew.” Yet as she begins to dive into deep, ineffable emotions, her rhymes only become simpler and more playful, making the process sound almost easy as shimmery textures swirl around her; a lovely example of how the band, too, keeps expanding its palette even if some of the urgency has faded.

2. Words

What’s that about a lack of urgency? If the opener demonstrates a level of comfort with the ineffable, ‘Words’ is wiry and kinetic. “Words are feathered and light,” Lenker sings, realizing she can make a wonderful display of them yet they can also be rife with tension, correcting nothing. Even the guitar solo sounds frustrated, wrapped around winding percussion and shadowy, wordless vocalizations from Laraaji as well as Alena Spanger, Hannah Cohen, and June McDoom. The subconscious taking form, yet never quite breaking through the surface.

3. Los Angeles

The song begins as a snapshot of a moment – coming home from the bar, drunk on laughter – to a portrait of a timeless love, one Lenker revisits with tangled grace. She’s swept up in the revitalized feeling but remembers the years past as a kind of coastal erosion. In a particularly moving verse, Lenker is joined by Meek as they sing, “There is so much that I wish I could’ve been for you somehow/ But we don’t need to talk about that now/ We’re finally in a good place meeting face to face.” A sobering realization that cuts through the song’s intoxicated cheerfulness.

4. All Night All Day

‘All Night All Day’ reverberates pleasure from its very first moments, blurring the line between tireless lovemaking and the eternal. “Love is just a name,” Lenker still concedes, but it’s not a word that weighs heavy, instead leaning into her own, embodied definition: “It’s a thing we say for what pulls through.” The all-female harmonies make the desire seem like it’s flowing in more than one direction, truly shared.

5. Double Infinity

Laying back over a languid chord progression and melodic bass, Lenker unspools some of her more poetic lines, situating herself “at the bridge of two infinities/ What is forming, what is fading.” Locking into a more memorable melody, she moves into a more direct kind of pleading, longing for beauty to reveal itself in all its mystery. It’s neither nostalgic nor celebratory, but caught between moods, which is emblematic of Double Infinity as a whole.

6. No Fear

“There is no fear” is the first of just ten lines Lenker keeps turning over on the seven-minute track, which coils around a drifting, atmospheric groove. In my mind, her words echo those of bell hooks, who writes in All About Love, “When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear – against alienation and separation. The choice to love is the choice to connect – to find ourselves in the other.” Lenker sort of articulates her own vision, more utopian than practicable (a few words short of “Imagine there’s no country”) – but a dream worth indulging in. No wonder it’s the longest track on the album.

7. Grandmother [feat. Laraaji]

Laraaji, a musical and vocal presence throughout Double Infinity, is the highlight on ‘Grandmother’, imbuing its assertive rock and roll with wordless splendor. But really, it’s the whole band – this is the first song Lenker, Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia wrote together – that turn a potentially over-earnest attempt at seeing the love through the pain into something tangible and radiant, sounding as big as ever in this formation, even through all the backing vocals.

8. Happy With You

Repetition does not have the same effect on’ Happy With Me’ as it does on a track like ‘No Fear’. Lenker recites just three lines – “I’m happy with you / Why do I need to explain myself?/ Poison shame” – and while the final two words are an interesting throwback to ‘All Night All Day’, there’s barely an inkling of frustration to break the sweet monotony. Lenker, who’s perfectly capable of writing an infectious love song, of course does not need to explain herself, but the song’s emotional ambiguity remains untapped – which is, indeed, a shame.

9. How Could I Have Known

The two infinities that Lenker oscillates between on the album are, simply put, the before and after of a long-lasting love. On the closer, her introspective sincerity, stirred by a lone walk in Paris, feels earned and genuinely moving. “They say time’s the fourth dimension/ They say everything lives and dies,” she sings. “But our love will live forever/ Though today we said goodbye.” The celestial guitar solo preceding the final refrain sounds capable of breaking through that fourth dimension. It’s not difficult to see the song in the context of the losses Big Thief themselves have endured, especially since it’s the one song that sonically reverts to the most traditional version of the band. Once again, Lenker is clouding the frustration that comes with trying to imagine a new version of yourself. If Double Infinity is a bridge between endless iterations of the band, this is looking back at all the steps it took to get to the other side. The next bridge could sound totally different, but somehow, as Lenker puts it earlier , “taste the same.”