In some quarters, Big Thief’s 2022 double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You was hailed as their White Album, their Wowee Zowee. A sprawling masterpiece, an album by a band who had reached the stage of their career that you could legitimately call their post-criticism era. It arrived on the back of a string of four albums, each arguably better than the last, which, along with singer Adrianne Lenker’s solo output, was beginning to look like one of the most important bodies of work in twenty-first-century popular music. Big Thief were good, and they probably knew it. An album like Dragon – like the White Album, like Wowee Zowee – can only be made by a band with a certain amount of confidence.
But unlike Wowee Zowee or the White Album, Dragon was a calculated sprawl. The Beatles and Pavement made records that were unstructured, messy, sometimes self-sabotaging. Their acclaim grew as critics and listeners learned to embrace the mess, to see the more recherché moments as the playful experiments of bands at their peak. Dragon, for all the looseness of its songs, wasn’t like that. It wasn’t a mess. It had a structure; even, perhaps, a narrative. While it did share some of its ‘us against the world’ attitude of its creative forbears, there was no sense of creative infighting or impending interpersonal disharmony. Dragon flowed; its artistry was there for all to see. Lenker laid her soul bare – like she always does – and the band followed her. It was loose, yes, but the looseness was of a locked-in kind, and every one of its twenty songs earned its rightful place. Dragon was not so much their Wowee Zowee as their Blonde On Blonde.
As such, it’s rightly regarded as one of the best albums of the century so far, and its stock continues to grow. So the problem now for Big Thief is how to follow a genuine masterpiece. It’s a problem confounded by recent upheaval within the band. Last July, they announced the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik, explaining it was for “interpersonal reasons with mutual respect in our hearts”.
In a band as closely-knit as Big Thief obviously are, the jettisoning of a member must have been akin to losing a limb. Couple that with the sheer impossibility of following up an era-defining album, and it soon becomes evident that Double Infinity was always going to be different. At nine tracks and 42 minutes, it’s a leaner beast than Dragon, but if anything, its sonic range is wider. The band, ostensibly reduced to core members Lenker (vocals and guitar), Buck Meek (guitar) and James Krivchenia (drums and synths), have effectively expanded to a thirteen-piece, with Oleartchik’s spot on bass taken by Joshua Crumbly. Amongst the other musicians is experimental multi-instrumentalist Laraaji, who provides zither, electronics and vocal melodies.
Laraaji’s influence seems to be an important one, and it is felt all over Double Infinity. The distinctive tang of new age and ambient music is frequently noticeable, and Lenker’s lyrics, which have always delicately knitted together the spiritual and the carnal, seem now to synthesise those ideas even further. She is unsurpassed when it comes to presenting complex inner thoughts and feelings in apparently simple (and melodically malleable) turns of phrase, and on All Night All Day – one of the first songs many fans will have heard from the album – she produces one of the most unabashedly sensual lyrics of her career: a simple description of an act of physical love becomes a treatise on the nature of intimacy, spurred on by insistent percussion and bordered by Mikey Buishas’ impressionistic piano notes.
The title track explores similar themes, though here beauty and love is described in intellectual rather than corporeal terms. Lenker puts in one of her finest vocal performances, soaring and then descending, the melody pulling on the twined threads of pathos and elation. She has always been preoccupied with simultaneity, with the twin inevitabilities of love and death, and how they relate to the human body and the natural world. Here (perhaps due to the world’s increasingly fragile state) her responses to those inevitabilities seem to be sharpened. Grandmother, with its improvised vocalisations by Laraaji, brings these ideas into the clearest and most existentially terrifying focus, as Lenker contemplates a time in the near future when ‘there’ll be no bar, no car, no stadium’ and comes to the conclusion that the best course of action is celebration of the here and now: ‘Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.’
Those themes of simultaneity and doubling often call for contrast, musically speaking. On Incomprehensible, the album’s opener, the clarity of Lenker’s vocals is contrasted with Meek’s deliberately wobbly guitar lines to stunning effect. Meek has always had the knack of making something strikingly different out of soft and unassuming raw materials, and on this album, he hones that knack to near-perfection. Meek’s presence is the lime in the coconut, the crack in the kintsugi. It’s there at the end of Los Angeles, in a discordant concluding solo that rubs its back against Lenker’s raw acoustic strum and sparkling lyrical energy.
There are musical risks that just about pay off (the backing vocals that act as extra instruments on Words make it sound like Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, which is no bad thing in my book) and those that more than pay off, that begin to make the whole album make sense by tying things together. As always, Meek’s guitar is high on the list of these risky but sometimes transcendent moments, but on this album, it is joined by a deeper sonic shift towards the ambient. The whole of Double Infinity is defined by a combination of woozy, billowing layers and tight, clipped percussion. Whether this is a new direction or a momentary exploration remains to be seen, but either way, it is an intriguing development for a band clearly looking to forge ahead after three years of comparative inactivity, tempered by turmoil. The new sound may take some getting used to, but spending time with this record will doubtless have its rewards.
This iteration of Big Thief is embodied in songs like No Fear, a rangy, slow-burning soundscape propelled by rubbery bass and complex underlying rhythms. Lenker’s lyrics are pared right back until they sound like a combination of mantra and playground rhyme, before the song unfolds in an outburst of bells, chimes and electronic flutters. The last couple of songs do return us to more familiar indie-folk territory: the delightfully simple Happy With You foregrounds Lenker’s minimal lyrics over an acoustic strum and a bubbling rhythm section, the repetition soon straying into the realm of euphoria. Closer How Could I Have Known is a folksy alt-country heartbreaker of a song, Lenker projecting her personal narrative over the (literally) timeless universal concerns of love and loneliness. It has a subtlety and range that make it one of her most accomplished pieces of songwriting: her narrator traverses the streets and bridges of Paris, while also contemplating the knottier paths of human relationships and corporeal impermanence.
In the end, Double Infinity is an album dedicated to this impermanence, and to its flipside: love and its constant presence. It goes without saying that it’s big on ideas. It’s also big on melodic innovation and collaborative spirit. And most importantly, it’s a record with a gigantic heart.
Double Infinity (September 12th, 2025) 4AD
Pre-Order/Pre-Save: https://bigthief.ffm.to/doubleinfinity
BIG THIEF 2025/26 TOUR DATES
17 September – SACRAMENTO, CA, USA, Channel 24 < SOLD OUT
19 September – TROUTDALE, OR, USA, McMenamins Edgefield < SOLD OUT
21 September – BOISE, ID, USA, Outlaw Field <
22 September – SALT LAKE CITY, UT, USA, Twilight Concert Series < SOLD OUT
25 September – BERKELEY, CA, USA, The Greek Theatre ~
27 September – LOS ANGELES, CA, USA, Hollywood Bowl >
28 September – SAN DIEGO, CA, USA, The Rady Shell at Jacobs Park ~
1 October – MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, Teatro Metropolitan
20 October – PORTLAND, ME, USA, State Theatre √SOLD OUT
21 October – BOSTON, MA, USA, MGM Music Hall at Fenway √SOLD OUT
22 October – PHILADELPHIA, PA, USA, The Met √ SOLD OUT
24 October – WASHINGTON, DC, USA, The Anthem √
25 October – FOREST HILLS, NY, USA, Forest Hills Stadium √
29 October – RALEIGH, NC, USA, Red Hat Amphitheater √
30 October – ATLANTA, GA, USA, The Fox Theatre √
31 October – NEW ORLEANS, LA, USA, Saenger Theatre √
3 November – TULSA, OK, USA, Cain’s Ballroom √SOLD OUT
4 November – DALLAS, TX, USA, The Bomb Factory √
5 November – AUSTIN, TX, USA, Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park √
7 November – HOUSTON, TX, USA, White Oak Music Hall √
8, 9 April – OSLO, NORWAY, Sentrum Scene *
10 April – STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN, B-K *
11 April – COPENHAGEN, DENMARK, K.B. Hallen *
13 April – BERLIN, GERMANY, Columbiahalle *
14 April – COLOGNE, GERMANY, E-Werk *
17,18 April – PARIS, FRANCE, L’Olympia *
21 April – AMSTERDAM, NETHERLANDS, AFAS Live *
23, 24 April – LONDON, UK, O2 Academy Brixton *
25 April – LONDON, UK, O2 Academy Brixton ^
29 April – DUBLIN, IRELAND, 3Arena ^
27 May – MANCHESTER, UK, Aviva Studios %
30 May – GLASGOW, UK, Barrowland Balloom %
2 June – BRUSSELS, BELGIUM, Forest National %
3 June – LUXEMBOURG CITY, LUXEMBOURG, den Atelier %
14 June – MILAN, ITALY, Magnolia %
15 June – MUNICH, GERMANY, Tonhalle %
16 June – HAMBURG, GERMANY, Große Freiheit 36 %
< with Kiki Cavazos
√ with Lomeida
~ with Steven van Betten
> with Noname
* with Dylan Meek
^ with Laraaji
% with Ata Kak