Big Thief’s latest album, ‘Double Infinity’, masterfully stretches across the borders of what it means to lose and to find anew, to hold and to release, expertly navigating the often most tumultuous side of our emotions: existing in the pull between oppositions. Big Thief explore what it means to exist in the thin intangible line of the present as the past and future call to us.

Now a three-piece band after their bassist Max Oleartchik left, Big Thief set about to write more of a rock-influenced album, but decided to change pace after coming up unsatisfied with their sound. Not wanting to completely replace their past bandmate, they instead sought to rid themselves of their creative “echo chamber” by forming a new community of artists, breaking with their looping thoughts and embarking on something new and changeable. 

When composing the tracks themselves, the band, along with the other collaborators, would lay down a basic beat and experiment around that, flowing with what felt natural and intuitive. There is a certain fluidity to their sound that, while felt in the care-free nature of their folk influence, hasn’t been as at the forefront as it feels on ‘Double Infinity’.

As their first track and first single to be released, ‘Incomprehensible’ plants its feet into this new shimmering and cosmic sound from the very first note. While their folk influence is still foundational, the new sonic leaning is more produced compared to their jammier earlier sound. 

Where their old music felt like a world approaching dusk, the sun in full bloom, settling between the folds of the hills, this new album sits in the dark open night with the moon as company. Neither sound outdoes the other, but only seeks to highlight different elements, whether it be exposed in their bright or pearly light, casting alternating shadows and new philosophies.

The caster of this light is often the band’s vocalist, Adrianne Lenker, with her critical and curious gaze sweeping over new territories or retracing her steps through already worked earth, unveiling something new. There is a certain irony in the track ‘Words’ where Lenker, often hailed for her poetic lyricism, laments that “words don’t make sense”.

However, despite Big Thief’s lyrics orbiting the absurd and fanciful, often at first glance not “making sense”, this is the very quality that captivates and endears listeners to their music - that they can string together such opposing and seemingly random assortments of words to form truths.

Like her ex-partner in ‘Los Angeles’, Lenker sings for us, tying together intricate and tender truths into words, her wisdom shining through and untangling the innately confusing craft of turning feelings into language.

Lenker masterfully explores a plethora of relationships on ‘Double Infinity’, meeting them on the “bridge of two infinities”, in what they have made of her and how she will take this into new ones. Often, artists fall into the trap of writing solely on romantic love, but Lenker forms a tapestry of connections all weaving around one another, echoing lyrics back and forth. Her relationships aren’t contained neatly in their own songs but run into each other, complementing and complicating each other alike. 

In ‘Incomprehensible’, Lenker explores her relationship with ageing and how this is tied not only to what society has taught her to think but also to how this has affected “[her] mother, and [her] grandma, and [her] great grandma too”, a lineage of women all worked on by the same standards of beauty. Lenker, however, rejects the hands of society moulding her beauty and instead calls for nature to play its part: “So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair”.

There is a similar echo later in ‘All Night All Day’, focusing instead on the erotic and again this rejection of rigid beauty standards where she sings: “No beauty shackle or shame / Is banished here / In this room, your temple”. Beauty is explored here from all angles, through an abundance of relationships that are often discussed in isolation, but on ‘Double Infinity’, they culminate in a steady hum, mingling with the instruments.

Double Infinity walks the knife’s edge between past and present, “poison” and “sugar”, the insignificant and the looming. This is an album that not only discusses these opposites or the link between them, but what it is to exist where each pulls taught to either side of you, stretching you between these “two infinities”. In her bleeding of opposites, Lenker does with her lyrics as she always does: cuts and balms the wound in one fluid motion.

In the final moments of the album on the track ‘How Could I Have Known’, the band fades out until it is just Lenker and Buck Meek’s guitar simultaneously echoing their previous sound and providing a blank slate for future work. In these last seconds, Big Thief offer their audience one last moment to consider “what is forming, what is fading”.