Many would be wary of one of the most celebrated modern folk rock acts choosing to open their album with a wash of starry synths, but on the first track of the album, Big Thief surmise their aspirations with the opening word: “Incomprehensible.”
Since their debut in 2016, the acclaimed indie rock and folk outfit Big Thief has ridden the fine line between tender poetry and unique soundscapes throughout their entire career. From 2019’s experimental art-rock “U.F.O.F.” to mythic folk, sprawling with fantastical soundscapes captured on 2022’s “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You,” Big Thief have traversed seemingly whatever soundscape captures their imaginations.
Double Infinity is a uniquely new venture, however, not just due to the sound, but through the departure of longtime bandmate bassist Max Oleartchik. Continuing with a trio at the core: singer-songwriter Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia, each band member brings their own vital and undeniable presence to the band’s sound. However, there is no arguing that at the center of the band and their sound is Adrianne Lenker.
The second track, “Words”, summarizes much of Adrianne’s creative process for not only the album, but her work as a whole: “Words don’t make sense/Words are feathered and light/Words won’t make it right.” This contradictory relationship, where words mean everything and nothing, permeates and guides the album. Rather than sticking to the band’s previous storyline, the narrative delves deeply into love, loss, life, and death. Lenker and the band aim to capture a more intimate feeling and transport the listener to small, yet poignant moments with angelic soundscapes.
This leads Lenker to pull back more than she ever has as a lyricist, letting the audience fill in the gaps rather than painstakingly tracing every heart-wrenching, nostalgic detail herself. Take the song “Los Angeles” in which Lenker writes, “The ocean is bright and blue, and it opens to you every day/It took you in when I pushed you away.” She chooses to create a place that embodies the heartbreak rather than retracing the event of loss itself. It’s a song about those relationships that don’t need to be explained or understood; they just simply exist: “I’d follow you forever/Even without looking/You call, we come together.” The song itself leaves enough space to let the listener relate to their own relationships, yet is also so specific that it could only belong to Adrianne and whoever she was speaking to.
Later in the album, the song “Happy with You” both delights and perplexes the listener, as it is the most unique meditation Big Thief has created thus far, lyrically. The track includes only the repetition of the lines, “Happy with you/Why do I need to explain myself?/Poison Shame.” At the beginning, the track seems to be a meditative mantra that one would seem to recite to themselves in their most content and accomplished moment; however, as the track draws to its close, Lenker’s delivery delves into what can only be described as the ravings one would hear from someone breaking down and sobbing on the floor alone at night.
In keeping with the soundscape focus of the album, angelic backing vocals and rustic operatic synths are offset by a simple repetitive guitar lick. This track may seem challenging and frustrating to many die-hard fans of Lenker’s lyrical assassination, but after these hypnotic lines are repeated enough, it creates a world of feeling that would be understated and not done enough justice with too much in-depth lyrical description. Thus, placing this song firmly as the centerpiece of the album, as Lenker says, “Why do I need to explain myself?” She no longer has to, as the emotional plane she transports the listener to does that for her.
Double Infinity, in keeping with its name, reaches for an unending and infinite question: Am I able to exist with the feelings I have, or do I need to control them? Closing song “How Could I Have Known” not only poses Lenker’s ambivalent answer to the question, but also serves as a thematic closure to the album. Once again, a lush soundscape drowns the track with washed-out synths, handheld drums, and even bagpipes?
What makes this track unique, however, is that this is the most lyrically inviting song on the album. “They say time’s the fourth dimension/They say everything lives and dies/But our love will live forever/Though today we say goodbye” is not only Lenker’s reclamation of herself through all the tragedy and isolation enforced through the album, but a return to the lyrical focus of her previous works with her personal feelings and meditations at the center of the song that is not seen on any other on the album. Even still she sings it in unison with the rest of her band emphasizing that she is not alone in her emotions, that she doesn’t need to let them control her, but rather guide her and with a final bombastic blast of triumphant sound she gives her answer in the last lines of the album, “How could I have known/In that moment/What we’d turn into?”
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