I’m not one of those people that's like, ‘I can’t listen to my own music,’” says Adrianne Lenker, the ineffably serene frontwoman of Big Thief. “I f***ing love our music! Like, it’s good! It’s so fun to listen to.” She says that Double Infinity, the American indie band’s new record, is “one of my favourite albums ever”. Put these words in the mouth of someone like Liam Gallagher or Drake, and it might sound like excruciating egotism. Coming from Lenker, it just sounds like the truth.
It helps, of course, that she’s bang on the money: Big Thief’s music is fun to listen to – albeit a soulful, bittersweet, altogether quite involved type of fun. After breaking onto the scene with 2016’s Masterpiece, the band rapidly became one of the most respected and consistent forces in modern music. They are the sort of band that inspires ardent fanaticism: dense and vibrant on record, even more so live.
The three members of Big Thief – Lenker (guitar, vocals, and the bulk of the songwriting), Buck Meek (guitar, backing vocals) and James Krivchenia (drums) – are lounging around a suite at a trendy hotel in London’s Kings Cross, a few days after the release of “Incomprehensible”, Double Infinity’s hopeful, contemplative first single. The album is their first recorded as a three-piece – following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik last June, due to what was described at the time as “interpersonal reasons”. “It feels like a new era, like beginning again,” Lenker says. “But then I often have that feeling with art, and music.”
The steroidal prolificness of Big Thief’s output has been something of an awed running joke among fans and critics since 2019, when they released two immaculate albums, UFOF and Two Hands, within a five-month period. Double Infinity arrives on a more conventional timeline, being the band’s first release since the brilliant 2022 double album Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You. Well, that’s if you don’t count last year’s album Dance of Love, by singer-songwriter Tucker Zimmerman, on which Big Thief served as the backing band. Or the odd standalone single (“Vampire Empire” and “Born for Loving You”, for instance). Or the trio’s solo projects, which include, for Lenker, a Grammy-nominated solo album, a charity EP in aid of Palestine, and a 43-track live album, all released within the last year and a half. Meek released his third studio solo album, Haunted Mountain, in 2023, while Krivchenia has been all over the place: releasing a solo album and recording with artists such as Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and Gracie Abrams.
For Double Infinity, there were, says Meek, “something like 50 or 60 songs floating around that we started moving in different places. But then we narrowed down.” They recorded 16 songs, nine of which made the final cut. The conception of the album was slow and collaborative, involving lots of what Lenker describes as “imagination storms”. “We did that for almost two years,” she recalls, “and then we tried to record the album with just the three of us in isolation in the woods. But we realised that we really wanted to open up the doors and bring in a big community of people that we admire.” So they switched to the famous Power Station studio in Manhattan (where Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Madonna’s Like a Virgin and Springsteen’s Born in the USA were recorded) and roped in a team of choice musicians to fill out the sound.
“The process was very intuitive, we just went purely on instinct,” says Meek. “There was very little conversation at all – no one had heard the music leading up to the session. We would put together a groove really quick, and it just self-arranged, based on people’s instincts. The group created this kind of critical mass… this momentum where there isn’t any time for questioning.”
“We were definitely different, on the other side of making the album,” says Lenker. “We’ll carry that with us forever. Like, I play differently now because of the influence in that room. Like, my syncopation is different.”
There’s something enjoyably eccentric about Lenker. At one point, the 34-year-old rotates and sits upside down on the sofa, almost cat-like, her head dangling above the floor, eyes closed in thought. Born in Indianapolis, Lenker was raised in a series of what she’s described as Christian cults. (The most extreme of these, in which the family lived until she was four, had, she later told The New Yorker, a strict culture of biblical shame: “My sister’s name was evil, because it wasn’t in the Bible. Certain shapes were evil, too, like the star. When we prayed, the Bible couldn’t touch the floor.”) For most of her childhood, Lenker lived in and around Minnesota in the upper Midwest (probably best known to Brits as Fargo country); you can hear it passingly in her accent, in the cosy lilt of words like “sturdy”.
By age eight, she had already moved around a lot, and started writing songs; she released her first record at 13, under the auspices of her musician father. She met Meek in 2012, first pairing up creatively – releasing an album as a duo, 2014’s a-sides and b-sides, before forming Big Thief in 2015 – and then romantically. Lenker and Meek were married for three years, divorcing in 2018. But they have continued playing together, harmoniously.
Now it feels sturdy, and like where we’re meant to be. It feels like the three of us are strong, and inspired
Last year, the band embarked on a short European tour, in which they debuted, experimented with and honed many of the songs that would go on to form Double Infinity, and which included a headline slot at Wales’s mountain-flanked Green Man festival. A few days ago, I was speaking to someone who described that set as “historic”: a word that would probably sound like hyperbole to anyone who wasn’t there. “There was a magic that night,” Lenker says. Tracks such as “Grandmother” – the first song co-written by all three band members, channelling inter-generational feelings into rock ’n’ roll – or the searching, propulsive “Words” – became immediate favourites. “Incomprehensible” was an unfamiliar song that nonetheless had the crowd singing along in rapture.
“So much of what we played on that tour felt really tough,” admits Lenker. It was tough, in part, behind the scenes: that being their first time playing without Oleartchik. (For the tour, they were joined by Justin Felton on bass, as well as Jon Nellen on a second drum kit.) Lenker grows, for a moment, slightly sombre. Meek places a hand on her arm. “It feels very different than what we’re used to, because we spent 10 years as a four.” she says. “We have partnerships together. We spend so much time together, we basically live together, and have been through so much. It’s like a marriage. So the change is very significant.
“It took a while, just like getting a divorce would. Like when Buck and I got divorced… It took a while to smooth out into the new space where we are.” Meek did in fact briefly step back from the band, during a tour while the divorce was at its rawest. Lenker would go on to write songs about the breakup, which the band would perform onstage – a sort of exposing process, though one that Meek was “supportive of”, according to Krivchenia.
The confessional aspect of Lenker’s songwriting does not seem, at the moment, to have extended to Oleartchik’s departure, which remains, for now, slightly opaque. Fans have speculated that the Israeli bassist’s exit was related to his politics surrounding Palestine, but the band have not addressed this. In 2022, the band cancelled two controversial gigs in Oleartchik’s hometown of Tel Aviv, having initially defended the decision to perform in Israel on social media. Announcing the cancellation, they described the “recklessness and naïvete” of their previous defence of the gig, which they said had stemmed from “a simple belief that music can heal”, before adding, “We now recognise that the shows we had booked do not honour that sentiment.”
Double Infinity sheds no light on the rift; for the remaining three, it seems like there is a comfort in the reset. “Now it feels sturdy, and like where we’re meant to be. It feels like the three of us are strong, and inspired,” says Lenker. The other two band members nod. “It feels like the three of us are motivated, and equally committed to each other, as friends and creative partners,” says Meek. “[For Double Infinity], we opened it up” – also like a marriage, I suppose – “and let go of all control, not delegating anything. I could really feel our core within that.”
“Big Thief,” says Lenker, “is something that is flexible and fluid, and can expand and contract. In those moments of playing with everybody, we were all Big Thief.” “It’s just a name,” adds Meek – echoing, perhaps unintentionally, one of the lyrics in “All Night All Day”, Double Infinity’s second single: “Love is just a name/ It’s a thing we say/ For what pulls through/ ’Til we come together.” The track, incidentally, is wonderful – Lenker’s songwriting at its precise and soul-stirring best.
Given Lenker’s place at the head of the group, and the sheer rarity of her talent, Big Thief is too often discussed through the sole lens of her artistry. But there’s a real parity to the way the band interact, musically and conversationally. Meek – a 38-year-old Texan steeped in the music of Townes Van Zandt, with a soft-spoken voice and a lively dress sense – speaks about the significance of leading his own band, via his solo project. “There, I get to develop empathy for my band,” he says. “When I come back to Big Thief, I think I understand Adrianne’s position, her mindset as a band leader.”
Krivchenia, 36, is a man of preternatural mellowness, which transforms, on stage, into a sort of ecstatic abandon. “I feel like we’re all sort of bringing back these different things, or songs, that we collect, through our musical endeavours when we’re not together,” he says. “And just, like, life! We’re all busy, and living our own wild lives too, and then we come back to Big Thief and there’s so much to catch up on that just feeds into the band. It doesn’t feel like this stale thing.”
Towards the end of our interview, I start to feel more like a fly on the wall, as the three bandmates start joking and ruminating on each other’s answers. Lenker says that life is like “no small potatoes”, prompting a minute of discussion about potatoes, metaphorical and otherwise. I ask about regret, and they muse, loosely and cerebrally, for 10 minutes. Meek gets up to use the bathroom; when he comes back a few minutes later, they’re still on the subject.
“What’s funny about regret is that it has to do with the illusion of control,” says Lenker. “And sure, there are creative choices I might have made on records, had I known then what I know now. Or there are things that we said on social media that were ill-informed, or not well thought out in the moment. But you have to have grace for yourself and each other – as long as your heart's in the right place and you're earnest about wanting to grow, which I believe we all are.”
She pauses. “We’re just here to learn, and it's finite, and nobody escapes it,” Lenker adds. “The price you pay for learning is some of the things you lose along the way.”
Again, in the wrong context, there might be something didactic about this answer – or else a sort of rote, schmaltzy banality. But Big Thief is a band of probing honesty, and these words, again, ring out as true as any.
‘Double Infinity’ by Big Thief is released on 5 September on 4AD, and is available to pre-order at bigthief.net
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