Into The Music
Big Thief is a Brooklyn-based band led by singer and guitarist Adrianne Lenker, and the difficulty in describing what they do precisely is part of what makes them interesting. They make music that is technically folk and country-adjacent but feels like neither, that is quiet but not delicate, that is emotionally overwhelming without being sentimental.
Lenker formed the band in 2015 with Buck Meek, Max Oleander, and James Krivchenia. Their debut, Masterpiece, came out in 2016 and established the core of what they do: acoustic-leaning arrangements, Lenker’s voice at the center of everything, and a lyrical approach that treated the physical world as a carrier of emotional information. A detail about a kitchen or a field or a hand becomes, in Lenker’s writing, a vehicle for something much larger.
Two Birds One Stone in 2019 and Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You in 2022 both received significant critical attention, and the latter, a double album recorded across four sessions in different locations with different configurations, became something of a landmark for how much ground a band working in a traditional acoustic mode could cover without losing coherence.
Lenker has also released several solo albums that explore the quieter edges of what Big Thief approaches from a slightly different angle. The two bodies of work inform each other without either one explaining the other. She is one of the more consistently interesting songwriters working in American music, and the band she leads is one of the better arguments for the continued vitality of the guitar song.