Songs And Instrumentals

Released together on 23 October 2020, songs and instrumentals feel less like sister records than twin snapshots of the same silence. Adrianne Lenker’s fourth and fifth solo albums were born in isolation, after a breakup and after Big Thief’s touring plans were halted by the pandemic, and you can hear all of that circumstance in the grain of them. Not as concept, not as marketing, but as atmosphere: wind in the walls, chimes on the porch, birds in the trees, a voice and a guitar trying to make sense of stillness.

Recorded in a one-room pine cabin in Western Massachusetts on an eight-track machine, the pair strip Lenker’s music back to essentials without ever sounding slight. The set-up was modest, even stubbornly so. She and engineer Phil Weinrobe worked through technical setbacks, considered using cassette, and ultimately recorded the albums through an all-analogue process. That tactile devotion matters. These recordings do not simply sound intimate, they sound lived in. Rain, insects, fire from a wood stove, porch chimes and the movement of air are not decorative details. They are part of the music’s breathing.

Of the two, songs is the emotional centre. Across 11 tracks and 39 minutes, Lenker leans into more direct, first-person writing than before, and the result is devastating in its clarity. She has described it as her most personal album, and that lands immediately in songs like “Dragon Eyes”, where the plainness of “I just want a place with you” feels all the more cutting because she does not dress it up. These songs are traditional only in the loosest sense. Yes, they are built from voice and acoustic guitar, but they never feel merely skeletal. They feel exposed. The lo-fi setting gives the album an autumnal hush, but the writing is what keeps it from drifting into prettiness.

Instrumentals, by contrast, is less about confession than environment. Made up of just two long pieces, “Music for Indigo” and “Mostly Chimes”, it stretches the cabin’s language into something more meditative and elemental. “Music for Indigo”, assembled from improvised acoustic guitar pieces, carries the ache of private ritual, especially once Lenker sighs and says, “I’m starting over” near the end. “Mostly Chimes” begins with guitar and gradually surrenders to the world outside, becoming a study in wind, birdsong and resonant metal. It is not empty. It is attentive.

What makes these albums so affecting is how naturally they complement each other. Songs offers the human voice at its most vulnerable. Instrumentals offers the surrounding world, patient and unmoved, yet somehow consoling. Together, they create a listening experience that feels both bruised and healing. Lenker does not force meaning onto every moment. She lets it gather in the room.

The release was preceded by the singles “Anything” and “Dragon Eyes”, and both albums were met with critical acclaim. That response makes sense. These are records that seem to have stepped away from the modern world without losing any of its emotional weight. If songs is heartbreak spoken plainly, instrumentals is what remains once the talking stops. Both are beautiful. Together, they are quietly extraordinary.