There’s a quiet maximalism informing every decision on indie-folk trio Big Thief’s latest album. Those might sound like juxtaposing characteristics, but that’s exactly how it feels.
Down-to-earth acoustic instrumentation decorates the arrangements in highly detailed ways; quaint humanity weaves between philosophical thought. Even the album’s title, Double Infinity, seems deliberately softened — the inexpressible limit given spatial confines, making the infinite nature of existence feel more contained, more manageable.
The group’s sixth album arrives three years after 2022’s double-LP, Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You. At half the runtime, Double Infinity feels somehow grander — enlightened, yet tethered to the human experience at every turn.
“Incomprehensible” introduces the album’s core dichotomy, with lead-vocalist and songwriter Adrianne Lenker painting a picture of a road trip through run-on verses that emulate it. Her simplistic scenery opens to the vastness of the universe as she’s circumstantially consumed by existential forces.
“In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be thirty-three,
that doesn’t really matter next to eternity”
The individual is placed beside the infinite. The now sits between “what’s been lost and what lies waiting” — a lyric within the album’s emotionally potent title track that contributes brilliantly to the framing of Lenker’s “infinity.”
“Words” isn’t necessarily as show-stopping as some of the record’s denser tracks, but its more grounded subject matter fits the album’s themes perfectly. The lyrics, showcasing an attempt to find the “right words“ to pair with her “subconscious” melody, read like a glimpse into her imperfections while continuing to meditate on life’s intrinsic volatility.
“Grandmother,” a later track on the album, takes a similar songwriting approach, with somewhat digestible lyrics gyrating atop an underpinning ambiguity. The verses see Lenker going into detail about her fears of aging and the implications of time passing, with a complex arrangement of acoustic instruments and soaring communal harmonies adorning the mix.
The chorus (“gonna turn it all into rock and roll”) exemplifies Double Infinity’s thesis: the balance of love and pain in understanding one’s existence, as well as art’s role in that process.
The band honors “rock and roll” as art, history, and culture at large, canonizing life and events into a meaningful collective consciousness, which Lenker spends the track ruminating on her place within.
Songs like “Los Angeles” and “All Night All Day” devote themselves to “love,” yet not necessarily of a particular kind. Lenker operates congruently between the human and the universal through incredibly warm textures and harmonies, giving these “love songs” a grandiosity not often felt in the traditional “love song.”
And while the penultimate “Happy with You” appears outwardly simplistic, Lenker’s use of minimalistic lyrics makes for a surprisingly refreshing moment in the album, especially considering the tracks around it are some of the most intricately put together on the whole album.
“Happy with You” is as tender and intimate as they come, with Lenker employing repetitive lyrical techniques to focus on the raw joyousness within a genuine human relationship. She repeats the phrase, “I’m happy with you,” forty-four times throughout the track’s four-and-a-half minutes, occasionally interjecting to ask why it’s necessary to explain any further.
“No Fear” marks a seismic change for the album, at least in a musical sense, with the hypnotic Eastern-influenced percussion creating a space where structure no longer matters. Lenker sings a recurring mantra-like verse that spirals the listener through a timeless whirlpool. Societal constructs are set aside, and for a moment, life is experienced the way it was meant to be — as pure, infinite unity.
The closer, “How Could I Have Known,” parallels the album’s opener in that Lenker uses evocative imagery to place the listener in a very tangible moment. Here, it’s a reflective walk through the streets of Paris (a locale known as the “City of Love”) as she ponders love on a celestial scale. For a final time, the two infinities play out side by side.
“they say time's the fourth dimension,
They say everything lives and dies,
But our love will live forever,
Though, today, we said goodbye”
There’s an intense melancholy characterizing Lenker’s narration, accentuated by the mournful melody and dreamlike production, but it comes across as more enlightened than lost.
There is no greater distance than from the individual to the universe at large, and the only way to reconcile that is to never cease in searching for a higher meaning within life’s disorder. This drive to confront the universe’s eternal incomprehensibility distills what it means to be human — a species cosmically microscopic, who love, hurt, and are lucky enough to make music about it.
9/10
