Big Thief on becoming a trio, self-acceptance, and the expansive world of new album 'Double Infinity' • Cover Feature • DIY Magazine

Sometimes, the stuff you study in school just sticks. Maybe, years later, the innocence in To Kill A Mockingbird, or The Great Gatsby’s green light are right there ready to reference. Maybe it’s quoting Shakespeare, or reciting Sylvia Plath. For Adrianne Lenker, it’s French philosopher Pascal who has remained enduringly fascinating, ever since her collegiate self first came across his notion of ‘the two infinities’. That’s right, fact fans - in some ways, the title of Big Thief’s sixth studio album has been on the cards since 1670.

“For, in fact, what is man in nature?,” he writes in his collection, Pensées. “A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with the Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.”

“It had quite the impact on me,” Adrianne smiles, acknowledging that what she read as a student has since been turned over in her mind myriad times, assuming a morphed new form of its own. “It’s kind of like learning a song when you’re a kid, and then [when] you play it later as an adult, you don’t even know if that’s the way it was taught to you.”

She continues, meditatively: “The two infinities; double infinity; the inner, the outer; the micro, the macro; being at the bridge in these bodies where we can’t see anything before or after; and when you look down at things on a cellular level, it’s similar to looking out at the cosmos. It’s a concept I’ve often been drawn to; it’s always been in our general conversation.” She looks over at bandmates Buck Meek and James Krivchenia, who sit, either side of her cross-legged frame, on the squashy leather sofa of a London hotel suite.

All three, in different ways, seem slightly at odds with this setting - a room of glass coffee tables, tasteful neutrals and skyline views, where the city’s Victorian-terraced past rubs shoulders with its chrome-clad present. Really, they all seem slightly at odds with each other: Adrianne, in beautifully patchworked jeans her grandma made, idly fiddling with the plant behind; James, reclined and relaxed, hands folded behind his leopard print cap-wearing head; and Buck, his suave suit jacket abandoned as the British summer heat heightens. Get past the sartorial incongruity, though, and Big Thief come quickly into focus, not only as one cohesive band, but almost as one shared consciousness, the now-three members inextricably linked by the language they’ve penned and performed together.

“ “The more you make things, [the more] you become fluent in translating what it is you feel inside. — Adrianne Lenker

Over the course of five previous albums and nearly ten years, they’ve steadily transcended their cult indie-folk beginnings to become festival-headlining, Recording Academy-recognised auteurs (their last LP, 2022’s ‘Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You’, was nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at that year’s GRAMMYs). Paying little heed to the outside noise, though, the band are apparently still the same, self-sustaining unit that formed in Brooklyn a decade ago - people driven not by accolades, but by the betterment of their artistic practice (and who, while undeniably earnest, are far from the pretension such phrasing might suggest).

“The more you make things, [the more] you become fluent in translating what it is you feel inside,” Adrianne says. “Your vocabulary expands and your way of understanding yourself gets deeper and richer, and maybe you become better at putting it out there into the matrix for people to digest or comprehend.”

With experience has come self-acceptance, which in turn breeds the comfort and confidence needed for unbridled honesty. “I think good communication - whether it’s with yourself, writing something, or with a group - requires patience and iteration,” nods Buck. “In order to really get somewhere in communication, you have to get into a flow state; you have to iterate through the winding path of your conversation until you actually arrive somewhere. For us, finding a little more self-acceptance allows you to just be real, and then the process of iterating to get to something deeper is just a clearer, smoother path.”

James agrees, noting that “for this album, all three of us were triangulating on a point we were all noticing, making this collective understanding [of the record] before even doing it.” “None of us can even articulate what we’re trying to make, and yet we’re agreeing on what it is,” Adrianne laughs incredulously. “It’s really strange.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the name, ‘Double Infinity’ is a record of dichotomies. True to Pascal’s principle, it’s at once achingly intimate and unprecedentedly expansive, not just in ideas but in execution. Having parted ways with founding bassist Max Oleartchik in July last year (a decision the band said at the time was made due to “interpersonal reasons” but “with mutual respect in our hearts”), this is the sound of Big Thief turning the page as a trio. And yet, it’s also an album on which the door has been flung open to other musicians like never before - a move that, today, Adrianne notes was a direct result of the “huge paradigm shift” of Max’s departure.

“I think we just wanted to blow it wide open,” affirms Buck, reflecting on the decision to deliberately pop their previously insular creative bubble. “But we chose the players very carefully; we chose people that we really admired, and that we felt a trust with.” And, in doing so, the band actually came to feel more inherently themselves than ever. “We could just find our part and sink into it, and figure out who we were in the arrangement, and then let this group lift us up,” he says fondly. “[The contrast between] being in a vacuum - just the three of us, for instance, or alone - and having the space to try and project who you want to be onto a blank canvas; and being in a room with so much to respond to, and intuitively reacting to things: it’s a different way of being genuine.”

Even now, four months later, they speak about the studio experience with a certain reverence, attempting to put into words the particular alchemy of such instinctual, non-verbal communication. (“Every person interprets the song in their own way, and then is simultaneously reacting to everyone else, responding without words,” James enthuses). Though the three had worked out the bones of the songs in advance - having, for the first time ever, all written together - none of their ten other collaborators heard a note of music before stepping foot in New York’s The Power Station studio; “with someone like [eminent ambient musician] Laraaji,” James laughs of this leap of faith, “you don’t even really know what they’re gonna bring in terms of their actual instrument.”

“ “We just wanted to blow it wide open. — Buck Meek

The result is a sweeping sonic palette of zither, droning, and five-part harmonies, of improvised, barely overdubbed arrangements that are full to the brim yet somehow still spacious. Take lead single ‘Incomprehensible’, a prime example of just how much those initial ideas expanded over the course of the studio stint. Many fans first heard the track last summer, when Big Thief included it - in its original, much more raw form - in their live setlist for last summer’s festival run. The final recording, meanwhile, is a plush, distinctly pacier offering, bolstered by shimmering string flourishes and a marked tempo shift. “It’s funny, because I’ve seen people say ‘I like the old version’ or whatever,” nods Adrianne. “But for me, when it became double time, it really clicked. I felt like the music matched the feeling of the words [then]; it was like moving down a highway.” She exhales deeply and closes her eyes, as if feeling wind running through her hair. “Like: ‘ah, yes!’”.

Where post-lineup change pressure could have easily led the band to seek safety in prescriptive, clearly delineated processes, instead they chose to follow their intuition in pursuit of the intangible “essence” of ‘Double Infinity’ - a title which came long before any of the tracks themselves. “At first we thought ‘let’s just make rock and roll’,” says Adrianne. “And then we said: ‘what even is that?’, because we all have such different feelings for what rock and roll is. We kept talking about [concepts] like ‘shimmery’ and ‘ethereal’ and ‘Enya’-.” “‘Enya in a barn’,” James confirms, as everyone laughs, “that was our thing.” Ultimately, Buck explains, “what felt more rock and roll to us at the time was just something that felt weightless, and that made you want to move and feel young.”

It was, in every sense, the epitome of trusting the process: every day for three weeks, in the depths of a brutal cold snap, the band would cycle ten miles to the studio and immerse themselves utterly for nine hours straight - a creative Groundhog Day devoid of outsiders, distractions, and even windows. “It was a timeless, seasonless place, just suspended in time,” describes Buck, as Adrianne offers: “like a warm, wooden womb.”

“We actually tried recording in our old way, in the countryside, for a bit,” she continues. “But we realised that instead of the outside being our refuge - when you’re in the studio and you go and jump in the river or walk in the trees - we actually needed the inside to be a refuge. Outside it’s loud, and it’s New York, and there’s people and the city and sirens and bustling and cold; so inside becomes this warm refuge place. It really felt like a needed thing, to be pulling inward.” As she speaks, her voice takes on a curious quality, as if she’s treading an unexplored neural pathway in real time. “And that’s also poignant for ‘Double Infinity’; the more inward we went, deep inside, the bigger [the record] became - the inward infinity and the outward infinity. I also feel like this with lyric writing: sometimes, the more micro you get, the more macro it becomes.”

“ “‘Enya in a barn’; that was our thing. — James Krivchenia

And, in following this instinct to its nth degree, Adrianne connects our inner selves and the outer world, creating a lyrical Möbius strip where the two are one and the same. At times, particularly personal points of reference are offset by some universal truth (“Grandmother, my mother / Tell me about the lake again / […] / We are made of love / We are also made of pain,” she murmurs on ‘Grandmother’). At others, reflections aren’t grounded in the past, but inform forward-facing musings on mortality and memory (“And they say time’s the fourth dimension / They say everything lives and dies / But our love will live forever / Though today we said goodbye,” goes closer ‘How Could I Have Known’).

The album is a document of all-encompassing interconnection, of our fundamental desire to understand and be understood, to be part of something bigger than ourselves and yet the centre of our own universe. It is, quite literally, timeless.

“From a slightly outside perspective of analysing Adrianne’s songs, I feel like part of the deep power in them is that they always have this familiarity - a good song by anyone does,” says James. “You can’t imagine it not existing after you’ve heard it; you just think ‘oh man, that is so sturdy - that must have been sung for 1000 years’. And Adrianne is so good at anchoring [her songs] with familiarity… [you think] ‘this feels like a feeling I’ve had’, and yet it’s so fresh.”

Adrianne beams at her bandmate. “My friend told me of this concept called ‘future nostalgia’: nostalgia for something you haven’t even experienced yet. And that’s often the feeling I get when writing, because it’s not just about [being] sentimental and looking back, it’s about the excitement of the world…. It has to be forward and backward and present for it to be ‘Double Infinity’. I think we are made of all of those, all at once.” “To me,” joins Buck, “the nostalgia - or the future nostalgia, or maybe it’s a nostalgia for the present - that I hear in your songs doesn’t feel like they’re idealising the past or the future. It feels like gratitude.”

“ “I hope this album is about everything. It’s coming back to that sensation of true love, true beauty, and longing to know it, for real. — Adrianne Lenker

This may well be the crux of ‘Double Infinity’: whether acknowledging the deep, enduring connection between ex-lovers (‘Los Angeles’), exulting in the euphoria of physical intimacy (‘All Night All Day’) or embracing the passage of time as a gift (‘Incomprehensible’), these nine tracks are shot through with the sense that to feel is to be alive, and to be alive is to be lucky. It’s a philosophy that, with age, Adrianne has tried to practice as much as preach.

“I think that’s the hardest, to look at yourself and see all the beauty that’s there,” she says softly. “I mean, maybe for some it isn’t, but for me it has been. [‘Incomprehensible’] is written out of this desperation to grow to love myself, and to see myself as beautiful, and to get out of this nauseating and exhausting maze of appearances that we live in, where for some reason [we’ve] been conditioned to only see a certain shape, or palette, or age or whatever as beautiful. We’re just aging the whole time, so most of your life is not in that initial youth period, and it’s so sad to me that a lot of people spend the beautiful years of their lives feeling that they shouldn’t be getting older or looking older.”

She continues: “I listen to Clarissa Pinkola Estés a lot - she’s written Women Who Run With The Wolves, and has different podcasts and audiobooks [like] The Joyous Body and The Dangerous Old Woman, where she talks about how our bodies are our friends. [I’m] just coming to be in my body, I guess, and to not be resisting it. I want to look in the mirror now, and tomorrow, and when I’m 40 and 50 and 60, and truly feel beautiful. There’s a real richness with time, and it’s a blessing to get older, because not everyone gets to.”

And so, nestled between its existential mediations, the album also offers a pair of lyrically sparse, almost incantation-like recordings; titled ‘No Fear’ and ‘Happy With You’, the tracks are, Adrianne explains, a call to “dissolve the lines, dissolve these things that make us feel separate from each other, from ourselves.” The latter, she says, is specifically about “dissolving the bounds around love, around who your partner should be, around who you love and how you love, and how you see yourself. This album is a love album, in the biggest sense.”

A summation of “the deepest part of who we are”; of philosophy and sociology and personal history; of “the strangeness of being human, and all the questions that come with that”: not bad for a 41 minute runtime. Where such a manifesto would be absurd in the hands of another band, for Big Thief, it seems, there is no concept too vast. “The eye behind the essence / Still, unmovable, unchanging,” Adrianne smiles, quoting ‘Double Infinity’’s title track. “I hope this album is about everything. I think it is. It’s coming back to that sensation of true love, true beauty, and longing to know it, for real.”

‘Double Infinity’ is out now via 4AD.

Tags: Cover Features, Features, Big Thief, From The Magazine, September 2025