Arts and Entertainment

Big Thief’s Double Infinity: Exploring Love and What Can’t Be Said

Big Thief’s new album Double Infinity is a raw, exploratory folk-rock record that embraces imperfection and contradiction, using Adrianne Lenker’s intimate lyricism and the band’s loosened sound to explore love, memory, and the beauty of the unknown.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

American indie rock band Big Thief released their sixth studio album, Double Infinity (2025), on September 5. Across their discography, the band has built a reputation of deep, intimate lyricism and a folk-centered sound. With Double Infinity, Big Thief expands on the songcraft that their fans adore while moving towards a looser, more exploratory sound. The Brooklyn-bred band leans into the unknown, embracing ephemerality, contradiction, and the thrill of not having all the answers.

Double Infinity is Big Thief’s first album as a trio. Since 2015, Big Thief has included bassist Max Oleartchik, guitarist Buck Meek, and lead singer and songwriter Adrianne Lenker. However, Oleartchik departed the band for “interpersonal reasons” in the summer of 2024. In a message announcing Oleartchik’s departure, the band stated, “this separation marks the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one for Big Thief.” This sentiment is definitely reflected in the band’s latest project. Rather than scrambling to fill the void of their lost member, Lenker, Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia use the shift as an opportunity to experiment. Recording live at the Power Station in New York over three weeks, they invited a rotating cast of guests, including ambient pioneer Laraaji, to shape the record’s sounds. The album’s loose and sometimes-wandering arrangements aren’t necessarily polished. Instead, they sound raw and alive. Big Thief utilizes improvisation, extra musicians, and ambient textures, giving Double Infinity a breathing, untethered feeling.

On Double Infinity, the band balances the familiar sound of past albums with the unexpected: stripped-back ballads recall U.F.O.F. (2019)’s gentle glow, while the ambient touches and improvised passages lean closer to the experimentation of Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022). Double Infinity’s production is intentionally porous: voice cracks, breathing, and the buzzing of the room are all audible. These imperfections become part of the album’s emotional honesty. The contrast between soft, intimate passages and more expansive, even psychedelic ones gives the album its power. Sonically, songs on Double Infinity build up with quiet moments, then tension, then release. However, there is a trade-off: sometimes the looseness and atmospherics enhance the emotional themes, other times they blur them by distracting from the lyrics. 

Lenker’s introspective songwriting is what draws so many people to Big Thief’s work, and this quality persists in Double Infinity.

Lenker digs into love (in its many contradictions), memory, aging, identity, impermanence, and the struggle between what can be said with language and what cannot. Lenker conjures vivid, concrete images, using them as entry points into broader themes. On the album’s opener, “Incomprehensible,” Lenker sings, “In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33 / That doesn’t really matter next to eternity / But I like a double number, and I like an odd one too / And everything I see from now on will be something new.” Here, aging is not a lament, but a lens: turning 33 is small next to “eternity,” but that doesn’t mean things won’t change. 

The track “Words” leans into a different tension: the struggle to make meaning out of language. It has a disquiet, frustrated energy about the gaps between what we feel and what we can say. Lenker sings, “Words are tired and tense / Words don’t make sense.” The guitars are agitated here, and the mood is not pastoral, contrasting the sonic elements of the rest of the record. “Words” highlights Lenker’s tendency to invoke longing or confusion without resolving it by the track’s end. 

The album’s title track wrestles directly with Double Infinity’s key ideas: loving, losing, waiting, and how love can persist through change. Lenker observes, “Deep within the center of / The picture is the one I love / The eye behind the essence / Still unmovable, unchangin’.” There’s vulnerability here: Lenker is acknowledging things lost, things that wait, and things that remain fixed; in many ways, the song is the thematic thesis of the record. 

Throughout Double Infinity, Big Thief explores juxtaposition: light and dark, joy and pain, fleeting and permanence, life and death. Double Infinity leans hard into these tension points. The album doesn’t avoid contradiction, but treats it as essential to the project’s themes.

Double Infinity is one of Big Thief’s most sincere, wide-reaching albums. It doesn’t abandon what the band has done before, but stretches beyond that. The record lingers, and it asks something of the listener, inviting them in. To get the most out of Double Infinity, one needs to be willing to find one’s own meaning within Big Thief’s story. For listeners who want tight narrative arcs that resolve cleanly, some parts may feel elusive. But for those willing to live in ambivalence, who trust that beauty can lie in the incomplete, this album offers not just comfort but a kind of grounded transcendence.