“Music and songs, for me, have always been a balm and a really healing thing to make,” explains Adrianne Lenker. She’s setting out the central goal of Big Thief’s new album, ‘Double Infinity’, while sprawled almost horizontally across the sofa in a North London hotel room.
Extremely jet-lagged, she apologises several times for going off topic over the course of our conversation today – often returning to the concept of high and low frequencies, and how the former has the power to lift her out of the shadowy depths. “There’s clouds out there right now,” she says at one point, gesturing out of the window. “Whoa, high vibes right there.”
Those high vibes are evident in the band’s sixth album, due out September 5, which has been two years in the making. Along the way, they parted ways with their original bassist Max Oleartchik and had to adapt as they continued to play live, write and record. It makes sense, then, that transformation – and approaching change as something to be embraced rather than feared – is a recurring theme in ‘Double Infinity’. “It’s unfolding, we’re all insane,” Lenker sings on ‘Grandmother’, dancing in a bar she claims is destined to disappear in a slightly apocalyptic fashion. “We are made of love, we are also made of pain.”
Bringing people with you through the darkness and drawing on love as a salve to all of the world’s destruction also crop up often. “Love is just a name/It’s a thing we say for what pulls through,” Lenker sings on standout ‘All Night, All Day’.
“Everyone we love will die, everything we know will die, everything will be gone,” she says. “We also have to let go of our own bodies. There’s not a single thing we can hold on to, and yet we’re given these incredible mechanisms for loving. I often wonder, why are we given these mechanisms for feeling and perceiving the way we do, and for asking questions the way we do? It seems like an incredible waste of energy if it were just random.
“I do believe in a higher, grander thing that is beyond my comprehension,” she ponders. “And I do think that stillness and change are strange and interesting subjects… because it seems that change is the only constant, and yet there might be a constant even beneath the change that’s actually still. But even my perception of what that stillness is is changing.”
Up until it was recorded last winter at the Power Station in New York, ‘Double Infinity’ was still in flux. Though the band had tried out a number of different approaches and arrangements, very little was coming together easily or intuitively.
“I feel like we often have a pretty focused intention leading up to when we actually arrive to record,” says drummer James Krivchenia. But this one, he explains, “went through some conceptual rigmarole” first.
“There’s not a single thing we can hold on to, and yet we’re given these incredible mechanisms for loving” – Adrianne Lenker
“Originally, we all kind of agreed we wanted to make a heavy rock album. That was the first concept,” says bandmate Buck Meek. “In the process [of making the album], we had let go of Max, our bass player of 10 years.”
At the same time, Big Thief were building themselves a “little ramshackle studio” out in the middle of the woods, in a location they’ll only cryptically describe as in the northeast US. They always imagined they would record ‘Double Infinity’ there – utilising the seclusion that helped them to make their 2019 album ‘U.F.O.F’ (recorded in a cabin in rural Washington) or 2022’s ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You’, with its four remote locations. But when they returned to tried-and-tested methods, hunkering down in nature and working in a bubble, something was off. Meek sums it up: “Basically, we were in isolation, out in the woods, feeling stuck.”
Though this band first started with Meek and Lenker – who hit it off at a show in Boston, and first began performing as a duo – Oleartchik had been on the scene since the beginning of Big Thief, and appears on every single studio album aside from ‘Double Infinity’. Originally a jazz bassist, with a free-flowing, improvisational style, he was a core part of the Big Thief sound. He also weathered the band’s previous ups and downs, including Meek and Lenker’s divorce in 2018 (though the pair seem beyond-amicable these days, they understandably took some time away from touring together when the split was fresh) as well as the cancellation of their planned show in his hometown of Tel Aviv back in 2022, amid mounting criticism of Israel’s conflict with Palestine.
Fans have speculated that the bassist may have left the band due to differing political views towards the ongoing Israel-Gaza war, but ‘Double Infinity’ sheds very little light on the situation. Since Oleartchik’s departure last year, the band have also not elaborated further on why they parted ways, simply citing “interpersonal reasons” in a statement. A year on, are Big Thief willing to discuss the reasons for the split in more depth?
“We won’t go into it because they are just very personal, and I don’t think it would serve anyone to publicise those personal reasons,” says Lenker, choosing her words carefully. Still, the band are happy to discuss how they’ve found readjusting to their new dynamic as a trio.
“It was hard, and there’s a lot of grief in it, because it was a partnership, in a real, very deep way,” Lenker continues, unprompted. “It was 10 years of living together and doing everything together, and then it was a really difficult breakup. It was really hard to go through that transition, but ultimately, I think it’s better for both of us.”
“Figuring out what the triangle was, after we broke up with Max, I feel, is such a big part of the ‘Double Infinity’ sound,” says Krivchenia. “And it’s also why we duffed it a couple times, too – I think just because we were learning. When we did a session as a trio, still pretty far after the breakup, we were like, ‘This will be great, right?’”
The trio soon realised they needed to “chart a new course”. Krivchenia outlines their thinking: “Let’s open the doors a little bit, get these people in and the air flowing through, and not tighten down into this little ball making our way through the world.”
“‘Double Infinity’ is like shouting from the mountain, these deepest things, all the way into the sky, and all the way into the core of the earth” – Adrianne Lenker
This is more or less how Big Thief ended up in Manhattan instead, recording ‘Double Infinity’ in the bustling city with a revolving door of close friends. Ginla’s Jon Nellen, Natural Information Society’s Mikel Patrick Avery, and new-age multi-instrumentalist Laraaji all feature on the album.
‘Double Infinity’ ultimately feels like a Big Thief and Friends album, the band rejuvenated by new creative voices following more sparing collaborations in the past. Lenker personally enjoyed working with singers Alena Spanger, Hannah Cohen and June McDoom. After years of mostly performing solo or alongside Big Thief, unlocking new harmonies and having her voice “cushioned by these angels” brought an interesting dimension. Throughout the process, the three vocalists made a habit of getting “a little witchy”, lighting incense and recording under many layers of cosy blankets in their own separate room.
“I’m like, super fluid, [but]… we had our ladies’ vibe!” she recalls. “Hannah was calling us ‘the goyles’ and it kind of brought that out of me! I feel masculine a lot, and I feel very fluid. I change, and I’m always different. Some days I’m this, and some days I’m that, but I was leaning into this feeling. I was being brought out. It was powerful, and it felt good.”
During the three-week recording of ‘Double Infinity’, the band biked to the studio and played music together with their collaborators for nine hours straight every day, tracking as they went. As a result, there’s a communal, free-flowing feel to the record, which stays on the brighter, more uplifting end of the Big Thief palette. “‘Double Infinity’ is like shouting from the mountain, these deepest things, all the way into the sky, and all the way into the core of the earth,” Lenker says.
Gazing back out at the clouds, she offers up a meandering metaphor for ‘Double Infinity’ as a kind of musical mantra that can help her to “dissolve the lines and the illusion of separateness” between people; a record that can arm her with the courage to state exactly what she needs.
“‘Let’s say the things that we want to create,’” she concludes. “That’s the kind of record we wanted to make.”
Big Thief’s ‘Double Infinity’ is out September 5 via 4AD.