Like some ancient astrologer connecting the stars into constellations to tell epic stories of grief and love, Adrienne Lenker traces her memories into songs that define the vast cosmology of Big Thief. Clothespins strewn on the floor commemorate a blossoming friendship, the kind that brings the warmth of your childhood home rushing back into your heart. The image of a lover drinking a beer in the yard evokes the yearning and resentment you feel for someone who loves you carelessly. Because of Lenker’s vivid storytelling, Big Thief have pinpointed the emotional core of life’s loftiest questions with a sense of poise and ease. Their music is wise, gutting, and hopeful, like waking up on New Year’s Day, your mind ablaze with all the regrets of the year past and the hope of the one to come.
On Double Infinity, Big Thief aren’t honing their sound but expanding it. These songs endeavor to express the purest kind of love, which surely must exist beyond language, beyond all human perception. Language, after all, can often be a tool of repression and obligation. On “Incomprehensible,” Lenker laments how it’s been used to teach us to hate our bodies, to fear aging, to say what we think we mean, to feel what we believe we’re supposed to feel. Only when we shed prescriptive ways of living for deeper emotion and more honest commitment to oneself and others can we experience lasting joy and freedom. This music captures the sound of ceding control, of pursuing a kind of emotional truth that can only be experienced, not intellectualized.
The music on Double Infinity was written and recorded in a particularly rootless and unpredictable phase for the band. Big Thief were once defined by their cohesion as a quartet: On earlier records, a searing electric guitar riff might fuse with a cacophonous drum beat until they hissed together like a two-headed snake. Lenker’s vocals could stream through an acoustic guitar line as gently as daylight through a cloud. But amid early recording sessions for Double Infinity, founding bassist Max Oleartchik left the group. The remaining three bandmembers leaned into the change. They invited 10 musicians, including the visionary new age artist Laraaji, to join them for three weeks’ worth of sessions at the Power Station studio in Manhattan. Tucked away from the biting winter cold for nine hours at a time, they improvised around songs that the core trio had written.
The resulting psych-folk arrangements are wandering and iterative. These songs are less inclined to tell a story from start to finish than transport you into a space of pure feeling. On “Grandmother,” a celebration of impermanence, Lenker cherishes kissing in the car and standing in a stadium even as she acknowledges the car and the stadium won’t always be around. The song honors love intertwined with loss, the present slipping into the past. The chorus feels a bit trite on its own, especially given the heft of the philosophical inquiry that precedes it: “Gonna turn it all into rock’n’roll.” But the song’s poignancy comes from the way the whirlpool of sound expands and contracts. Lenker’s airy voice weaves through a spacey guitar line, warped zither notes, and homespun backing vocals. Especially affecting are Laraaji’s wordless vocalizations—deep, ambered, and playful—which decorate the song and push it forward like early morning birdsong brings on the day.
Of course, Big Thief’s quest for spiritual freedom exists here in the real world. They have to use words to explain the limits of words, which is tricky. Sometimes their lyrical approach on Double Infinity—pulling back, leaving gaps for the listener to fill—works. “Los Angeles” is a particularly affecting account of an old relationship revived after many years apart. Over a gentle acoustic guitar, Lenker sings, “Two years feels like forever/But I know you without looking/You call, we come together.” Here, the sparse language evokes the kind of connection that doesn’t need to be explained, one that pulls two people back to each other like gravity. It helps that the chorus is punctuated with gorgeous imagery—the lost friend’s half-smile, a great blue ocean that became a salve when the relationship deteriorated. It’s a song where the action happens outside the frame, but the desire, regret, and love seep in.