Double Infinity

A band losing a founding member can respond by filling the vacancy, shrinking inward or pretending nothing has changed. Big Thief chose something more curious. Double Infinity, their sixth studio album and the first made by the core trio after bassist Max Oleartchik left in 2024, became an exercise in opening the doors. Rather than appoint a replacement, Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek and James Krivchenia entered New York’s Power Station with a wider group of musicians and treated collaboration as the point rather than the solution.

The route there was not straightforward. Big Thief wrote roughly 50 to 60 songs while considering what the next record should be. One early idea was a heavy rock album; another involved stripping things back in the woods. Neither direction stuck. Instead, the band recorded 16 songs live over three weeks at the Power Station with ten session musicians, with Dom Monks producing and mixing. Lenker and Krivchenia compared the process to dating after a breakup, an apt image for music that often sounds as though it is testing what can happen when familiar chemistry meets unfamiliar company.

That looseness suits the songs. “Incomprehensible” carries Lenker’s plain-spoken intimacy into a setting that feels communal rather than solitary, while “All Night All Day” has the easy motion of musicians discovering the shape of a song together. “Los Angeles / Grandmother” stretches the album’s frame further, its joined title hinting at the way memories and places can sit beside one another without needing to be neatly resolved. The arrangements are spacious enough for individual gestures to register, yet the record does not feel like a parade of guest appearances. The extra musicians function as a changing environment around the trio.

Double Infinity is therefore less a statement about replacing what was lost than about discovering what remains possible. That distinction matters. Big Thief’s strength has long been the sense that songs are living things rather than fixed objects, and the circumstances of this album make that quality especially audible. It is a record to hear for interaction: a rhythm nudged by another player, an arrangement opening where it might once have closed, a band letting uncertainty become useful.