Big Thief – Double Infinity (4AD) (13th Floor Album Review)
Big Thief… their Double Infinity is a record of continuity and rupture, intimacy and expansion. It feels like their most communal work, stitched together with the voices and playing of friends from the experimental, ambient, and folk underground, while also weaving the precise and universal into the lyric detail.
Across these songs, resonant percussion, glistening guitar lines, and tide-like dynamics create a soundworld that is both fragile and firm. It is an album of places, bodies, and memories, of ancestry and desire, where a single sensual image of a sight, sound, taste, or feeling becomes a portal into the infinite.
The departure of influential jazz bassist Max Oleartchik might have destabilised the group, but instead led to a broadening. Rather than replace him with a single voice, the band fill the space with a shifting cast: the ambient zither shimmer of Laraaji, the supple bass of Joshua Crumbly, tape loops and keys from Mikey Buishas, and extra layers of percussion from Mikel Patrick Avery, Jon Nellen, and Caleb Michel.
The layered harmonies of Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger add a blanket of voices wrapped around Adrianne Lenker’s lead vocals. These contributions are woven into the fabric of Big Thief, expanding their folk, country and rock foundations beyond the familiar guitars, bass and drums core. Where Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You sprawled across landscapes and styles, this record achieves breadth through communion: Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia opening the door and inviting others to become part of the conversation
What grounds this openness is the continuing quality and breadth of Lenker’s songwriting. Capacity was the album where she first confronted family trauma in unflinching detail, and in U.F.O.F. she provided a mystical landscape, and here those impulses converge. Her lyrics are crystalline in their detail, on Los Angeles, she lists postcodes and airline seats, “27D on an airplane” before opening into the intimacy of “You sang for me / You sang for me.” The song begins in the mundane but slips toward the universal; a boarding pass or overheard laugh become proof of eternal connection.
On Incomprehensible, Lenker recalls childhood relics,“Mr. Bear and the wooden box I hid” before acknowledging time’s passing: “In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33.” What might read as diary entry is transformed into a meditation on memory and ancestry, ending as it began: “Incomprehensible, let me be.” The autobiographical details return in Grandmother echoing the family themes of Mythological Beauty, but the refrain insists on transformation: “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.”
If the words provide the anchor, the music ties them together in soft haze and shifts from glow to rumble. Songs often emerge from silence or a single note, building into circling grooves that hang in the air before dissolving. Incomprehensible begins with one sustained tone, as cymbals and guitar glide into life around Lenker’s quiet vocal. Words rides on a grounded beat with a Latin undertow, turning back on itself until it fades out on cymbals. Its lyrics are a meditation on the limits of communication, hinting that music speaks where language fails.
All Night All Day shuffles with a near disco pulse, sparkling with synths and buoyed by harmonies; its erotic imagery, “All night all day I could go down on you” is sung with the reverence of a sacred ritual. No Fear stretches toward seven minutes, an unyielding, hypnotic mantra of resilience over percussion that stutters and swells. The lighter Happy With You carries glittering textures that demonstrate the band’s emotional range. The simplicity of the repeated title is offset by an off-kilter pace that twists the conventional into something Big Thief own, rather than borrow.
Throughout, the production lets the songs breathe. Guitars lead, glisten, and follow, drums falter then regain their footing, vocals rise like figures emerging from fog. It’s a language Big Thief have been developing since the earthiness of Two Hands and the textures of U.F.O.F.
Double Infinity unfolds as a journey through places (Los Angeles streets, Ontario lakes, airplane seats), through generations (grandmothers, mothers, children), through bodies (songs of pleasure and songs of pain), and through time itself. There are moments of stillness, moments of release, moments of lightness that carry the listener through this journey. The title suggests both moving forward, whilst looking back: two infinities, layered over each other, holding the ordinary and cosmic, as well as past and future, within each moment.
John Bradbury
BIG THIEF – DOUBLE INFINITY
5 September 2025 via 4AD
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