Big Thief’s sixth album arrives with a different gravitational pull. With bassist Max Oleartchik’s departure, the band is now a trio, and the space that opens up around Adrianne Lenker feels vast and unflinching. Lenker, whose biography has always felt marked by improbable survival—from a childhood in a Christian cult to a near-fatal accident involving a railroad spike lodged in her skull—uses Double Infinity to wrestle with the contradictions of living: pain and joy, decay and renewal, poison and sugar.
The record begins with “Incomprehensible,” a song about aging that turns the inevitability of gravity into sculpture: “So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair.” It’s the kind of Lenker line that scans as both intimate and cosmic, a recurring tension throughout. On “Words,” she deadpans, “Words are tired and tense / Words don’t make sense,” a simple paradox that, paired with the band’s loose, unfussy groove, recalls the oblique humour of Tom Tom Club filtered through Big Thief’s restless folk-rock.
There are flashes of brightness here, sometimes deceptive. “All Night All Day” bounces with poppy levity, its chorus built on the couplet “Swallow poison, swallow sugar / Sometimes they taste the same,” which lands like an epitaph disguised as a nursery rhyme. The title track, “Double Infinity,” emerges as a hushed, gorgeous love song, its spectral sway nodding to R.E.M.’s “E-Bow the Letter,” with Lenker’s lyrics—“Another from the future or the past / What’s lost or waitin’”—folding the album’s central dualities back in on themselves.
The album’s most transcendent moment comes with “Grandmother,” a sweeping meditation on inheritance and memory: “We are made of love / We are also made of pain.” Its has a slow-burning arrangement, but by the climax, with Laraaji’s celestial vocals spiralling upward, the song becomes a cosmic hymn to lineage and survival.
Lenker threads the dichotomy tighter on “Happy With You,” where the refrain “I’m happy with you” fractures into the interjection “poison shame.” It’s dizzying, like hearing joy and despair inhabiting the same body. The closer, “How Could I Have Known,” unravels into something paradoxical: a country singalong with lyrics set in Paris, where Lenker muses on the eternal temporality of love—“They say everything lives and dies / But our love will live forever / Though today we said goodbye.” The contradiction becomes the point, a thesis statement for the album’s title.
Double Infinity is another chapter in Big Thief’s ongoing evolution, a record that refuses stability in favour of dualities: sweet and bitter, playful and devastating, infinite and finite. Where other bands might flatten under such tension, Big Thief thrive, sounding more elemental and more human than ever.
Stream Double Infinity HERE.
