For their entire career, Big Thief has worked in and around loss: the loss of frontwoman Adrianne Lenker’s older brother who was given up for adoption, the dissolution of her intense romantic relationship with Indigo Sparke, and her divorce with the band’s guitarist, Buck Meek (who remained in the band alongside Lenker). Their new record Double Infinity comes after the 2024 departure of longtime bassist Max Oleartchik, whose leaving Lenker described in an interview with The Independent as “like a divorce.” 

If Oleartchik’s absence cast a shadow over Big Thief’s recording sessions, it certainly wasn’t a long one — Double Infinity glows green with life. Every artistic decision made on the album seems to work toward the singular goal of evoking the cosmic realization of life as a cycle of depletion and renewal. The whirlwind lead single and opener “Incomprehensible” begins with a magical twinkling, before the other instruments build and layer themselves in like staggered sunrises, while Lenker implores us to “let her be” as incomprehensible as the universe. Drones — a new addition to the band’s sound palette — loom overhead. Clashing sounds converge on “Words,” with reeling guitar feedback, echoing vocals, and pulsating bass grooves. Featured artist and New Age legend Laraaji vocalizes majestically on “Grandmother,” an intergenerational ode to the healing power of music. The chorus repeats like a mantra, in a tribute to Big Thief’s sonic ancestors: “Gonna turn it all / Into rock and roll.” Shimmering, starlit synthesizers abound throughout the record. Every guitar, down to the dirtiest one on “Words,” is soaked in reverb. The band opts for hugeness everywhere they can, expanding their atmosphere beyond the earth on which they’d been so firmly planted and into the cosmos. 

Whether Big Thief belongs up there remains to be seen. In a total departure from their previous work, Big Thief goes for shine and smoothness; if their landmark 2022 record Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You is a bedroom ceiling whose every inch is covered by peeling yet resilient glow-in-the-dark sticker stars, then Double Infinity is a night sky untouched by light pollution. But Dragon New Warm Mountain has proven to be a hard act to follow; scrappy and daring, it features some of the band’s most ambitious compositions and emotional work. Chaos lay at its nucleus, underpinning even its mellowest, most straightforward folk tracks. Where this chaos was harnessed and controlled on Dragon New Warm Mountain, it is contrived on Double Infinity. Any significant risk or ambition by the band is ironed out in service of a shinier soundscape. 

Even at its most disparate, Double Infinity is utterly frictionless. On “No Fear,” the band’s longest song to date at nearly seven minutes, the pleasure of its psychedelic abstraction and hypnotic bassline is smothered by its polish. Even on “Words,” one of the album’s best tracks, the band’s layering of dissonant sounds feels too deliberate, manufactured, less like the band went into the studio and followed Adrianne Lenker’s great big heart, and more like an artificial construction of disarray. This isn’t to say that Big Thief’s previous work is unfocused — quite the opposite is true. But where they once looked intently at the work before them with wild eyes, they’re too entranced in this spacey, psychedelic haze now to recognize that the last thing they should change about their music is its delightful messiness.

The appeal of Big Thief has always been that layer of grit and grime over every song — sometimes subtle, always impenetrable. Their best work was marked by friction, whether it was between tender acoustic guitars and yelping vocals or between ambition and cliché. Their softest folk cuts still have some bite to them. Even at their prettiest, they’re always just a little ugly. Double Infinity doesn’t see Big Thief at their most beautiful, but at their most purified. There is none of that enchanting ugliness to be found. Gone are the days of the frantic and uncomfortably long drum solo at the beginning of “Shark Smile” off 2017’s Capacity, the bloodstained lyricism of their 2023 fan-favorite single “Vampire Empire” and the ragged voice that sounds it all out, the nauseating flickers and flashes of the culminating hospital stay in Dragon New Warm Mountain‘s “Simulation Swarm.” Now, Big Thief eschews big feelings for big sounds, mistakes the cosmetic for the cosmic. The result is a work most clearly defined by what it is not. In all of its opulent beauty, Double Infinity amounts to being perfectly serviceable — and perfectly sterile.