Living in Purgatory with Big Thief

The idea of this middle place poignantly haunts Brooklyn indie-rock band Big Thief's latest record, Double Infinity. In a press release, the band noted that the album title refers to the idea of the “purgatory created by the human brain, always looking to the past or future, between the things we’ve lost and the things we want, between desire and regret.” There are few lyricists in recent memory writing as movingly about this experience—that of looking back, of time passing, moving, receding and stretching out in front of us—as Adrianne Lenker.

“Without this idea of time there’d be no grandmothers and grandfathers, or children,” Lenker says over the phone from Mexico City with bandmate Buck Meek. “There’d be no difference between any stages of life. It’s so wrapped up in reality as we know it, or at least this perceived reality or dream. I feel like it’s such an interesting idea, because it’s a thing that we live with, and the parade leads to the same place for everybody. It’s all wrapped up in death and birth and all of the things we experience along the way, like longing and loss and grief and joy. While you’re falling in love with someone, you’re also perceiving the end of that thing because of time—because of the inevitability of its passing.”

“While you’re falling in love with someone, you’re also perceiving the end of that thing because of time—because of the inevitability of its passing.”—Adrianna Lenker

On one hand, the nature of music makes it a simple task to create compositions concerned with time, as all music occurs over a duration of time. But what does it actually sound like to fully realize that? As a group, and this time with a cohort of studio collaborators, Big Thief’s sonic treatment of these themes captures a specific duality of being: its miraculousness and mundanity. Double Infinity’s production is low-key and handhewn, with rhythms and repetition building feelings that oscillate between grounded and hypnotic, and flourishes of the transcendental—be it blasts of guitar sorcery (“Words”) or ambient icon Laraaji’s wordless vocal flights (“Grandmother”). The result is Big Thief’s most fluid, breathing, flowing record to date—and, for Lenker, an evolution of what the term “rock ’n’ roll” can mean.