It wasn’t an eternity—it only felt like it.
This Friday, Big Thief is back with their first new record in nearly three years, Double Infinity. Don’t bother comparing it to their last album, 2022’s Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You; here is a release with eleven fewer songs and one fewer band member (longtime bassist Max Oleartchik departed the band last year, for unspecified reasons). These facts might imply a state of laxity, as if Adrienne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia are simply going through the motions, coasting on the identity they established over the last decade-plus as the most consistent unit in rock music. Nothing could be further from truth.
Double Infinity is not Big Thief’s first masterpiece (that would be 2016’s aptly-titled Masterpiece), nor their biggest leap forward (2019’s double shot U.F.O.F./Two Hands), nor their greatest statement (Dragon). It is something else entirely: their most elemental album, an unassuming, tidy little package destined, one day, to be remembered as (maybe) their best. It is the unmistakeable work of a band with nothing left to prove.
The first half of the album sails by in one long sigh, songs rolling ceaselessly one into the next into the next, breaking like waves of the shore of your cochlea. The opening barrage of “Incomprehensible,” “Words,” “Los Angeles,” and “All Night All Day” is the strongest four-song sequence on any record released this year. There’s a thrilling sense of momentum from the start, each track segueing seamlessly from what preceded. Some sort of hidden logic threads these songs together, a quasi-mystical rhythm glimpsed here and there in the language, particularly the delectable last lines of “Incomprehensible:” “Let me be naked alone, with nobody there / With mismatched socks and shoes and stuff stuffed in my underwear.”
Arrangements are busy, dense, striated—cacophonous, yes, but joyful, fully in tune despite it all. The first go at this material was made by Lenker, Meek, and Krivchenia alone, isolated in a woods way out off the grid. It didn’t work; the songs didn’t come alive. Eventually, the three called a mulligan, fled down to New York, and enlisted the help of a whole corps of collaborators. Thank god they did: this is music meant to be shared, a potluck of an album.
You’ll hear guitars and drums and supremely smooth bass work courtesy of Joshua Crumbly. You’ll also hear laughter and tape loops and the unmistakable presence of Laraaji, both his voice and his zither. His penchant for drone seeps into the record’s porous surface. There is a mantra-like quality to much of the music here. You don’t start and end these songs so much as you enter into and exit out of them. Surely, somewhere, they’re still going on, even when you’re no longer listening.
“Grandmother” especially. The first song written together by all three of Lenker, Meek, and Krivchenia, it’s a shaking, elliptical piece of music built around an unforgettable refrain: “gonna turn it all into rock and roll.” Love, bar, car, cloud, pain, rain—it’s all reducible to rhythm and blues. Rock music as alchemy. For this band, nothing could be a more appropriate mission statement.
As ever, there’s an aching romance to Lenker’s language, but it’s matched by a newfound sense of clarity. The record’s best lines are its most straightforward: it takes so much time to feel alive, why do I need to explain myself, there is no fear. It’s a warm gesture towards both the subject(s) of her songs as well as her listeners—call it prosaic poetry. The album’s best song, “Happy With You,” consists of a grand total of 13 words, three of which are in the title. No need to muddy the waters; some rivers just run clear.
Dragon New Warm Mountain was, true to its name, a mountain. It dared you to summit it, to devote yourself to the journey. It was—still is—an extraordinary experience, but not one you took often. Double Infinity is pleased to meet you where you are. Compact, portable, ready at a moment’s notice: it fits into your life wherever it might be led, from fluorescent, frigid Safeway aisles to windswept hills striped with dead golden grass swaying back and forth beneath creaking eucalyptus and great, gregarious oaks.
Turn it all into rock and roll.
“Double Infinity” is available Friday, September 5th