How Big Thief Found Itself Again

Buck Meek and Adrianne Lenker decided James Krivchenia belonged in Big Thief before they ever saw him touch a drumstick—at least, of the inedible variety. “James has this incredible way of enjoying a meal, where he’s, like, really vocal about it, and makes all these beautiful sounds,” Meek tells me over Zoom, eyes crinkling. It’s been more than a decade since Krivchenia engineered Big Thief’s studio debut, Masterpiece, but Meek, the band’s guitarist, clearly still relishes the memory. “We just really fell in love with James over the course of that week, especially at the dinner table,” he says. “After that session, we hired him—having never even heard him play the drums.” Krivchenia shakes his head and laughs at the retelling, but the story holds: Big Thief’s mythology has always blurred friendship and music until the lines between them disappeared.

That bond has long characterized the band’s reputation. Meek and Lenker dated, married, and divorced, and the group only seemed to grow closer in the aftermath. A Los Angeles Times feature in 2019 summed up the band’s reputation with this headline: “Inner chemistry drives Big Thief.” Even their discography is studded with tokens of intimacy—after all, the final “F” in U.F.O.F. stands for “friend.” By the time they broke through in the late 2010s, fans and critics alike were fascinated by their closeness, joking about promo photos where the four musicians pressed shoulder to shoulder as if trying to fuse into a single body.

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That persistent image—Big Thief as an unbreakable unit—inevitably made their first permanent rupture feel seismic. When bassist Max Oleartchik left in 2024, nine years into their run as a quartet, fans were blindsided. The band had weathered romance, divorce, and relentless touring, but Oleartchik’s exit cut differently. Almost immediately, speculation flared: the announcement had come on the heels of the band’s canceled Tel Aviv dates and its subsequent (rather muddled) public statements, and given Oleartchik’s Israeli background, it seemed easy to assume politics were the catalyst. Big Thief insists otherwise: while the timing was unfortunate, the causes were personal. They’ve likened the rupture to a divorce—a telling turn of phrase for a band that’s already survived one. And for a band whose identity was so bound to intimacy, the loss raised an existential question: what is Big Thief without the foundational chemistry that defined them?

That uncertainty hung over Double Infinity, their sixth record and first without Oleartchik. It’s also their follow-up to 2022’s maximalist masterpiece Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, an album that stretched across 20 songs and every style in their arsenal. Double Infinity doesn’t answer the question of who Big Thief is now, but instead asks how far their bonds—musical and personal—can stretch without breaking. What emerges is less a direction than a proof of concept: Big Thief could go anywhere, and still remain themselves. As Krivchenia puts it, “We had this realization that the Big Thief identity can actually foundationally hold a lot more than we once thought it could. It can hold all these different players, and we’re still leading and guiding it, but it feels like a sturdy ship by itself, too.”

The album begins with a sweet hush: Lenker asking, “How can beauty that is living be anything but true?” It carries itself like a tether between eras, or as she sings on the title track, a “bridge of two infinities,” where “what’s been lost” meets “what lies waiting.” And that bridge wasn’t crossed alone. Voices, instruments, and companions weave through the record, expanding its center by opening it up. It is a Big Thief record, but also a Big Thief record in quotation marks—its identity defined by permeability and invitation.

At first, though, the new trio struggled. After Oleartchik’s departure, they retreated into their studio, hoping habit and sheer force of will might carry them forward. What they found instead was stasis. “During this transition, we felt just trapped in this vacuum, this echo chamber of our own minds,” Meek says. “We felt so stuck.” Over a decade of playing together had created predictability: every gesture preordained, every song hemmed in by expectation. “It’s easy to fall into a dogma like that,” Meek explains. “If you try something and it works, then it’s natural to want to repeat it in the hopes of getting the same results. But usually it actually works against you—you can’t try to repeat a creative process.”

To break the cycle, they swung hard in the opposite direction from Dragon New Warm Mountain. “We wanted an oscillation from making such an expansive record,” Meek explains. “Something that’s short but very dense—still with a feeling of expansiveness or depth, but this time, found in the density and the relationships between the different instruments, even between the songs themselves. Kind of like an inverse of the other album.” Krivchenia agrees: “Last time, we were really trying to wear all our different styles out and highlight differences between the songs and sounds. So this time around, I think that we all just wanted it to be sharp and focused and pack a punch.”

Early on, Big Thief fantasized about that taking the form of “the heaviest fucking album we’ve ever made,” as Meek remembers with a grin—short, loud, full of screaming. They banked on it for years. But when it came time to work out the kinks, the songs refused. However loud they played, the music kept asking for something else—and as Krivchenia reiterated throughout our chat, Big Thief has always been, at its core, a song-first band. They follow where the current leads. And so the album that began as an attempt to hammer things into shape ended up being an “inverse” to Dragon New Warm Mountain in a different way: not dense with blistering riffs, but with interwoven layers; sensory overload not in volume but in texture; intensity coming not from blunt force but from voices and instruments pressed against each other until the edges blurred.

Eventually, they let go of control, but not so much as a conscious decision than a gradual acquiescence. “Up until the very end, almost, that short, heavy, rock and roll album was still our working concept,” Meek admits, smiling sheepishly. “But then, simultaneously, the songs that were actually being written were nothing like that at all?” In the end, I think we just kind of allowed that oblique relationship to happen. We just let the music be whatever it wanted to be.” It was a crucial moment of letting go of control, one Meek says he found a great deal of value in—starting with such a clear-set plan, then letting intention ebb with the tide. (Although hopefully that short, loud, screaming album will crop at another point; when asked, Meek grins and says, “I’m sure it’ll happen.”)

Even then, the echo chamber loomed. To escape it, the trio biked from Brooklyn to Manhattan each morning in the dead of winter, settling into the Power Station for three frozen weeks, each made up of 9-hour days. And, immersed in friends and collaborators, they finally cracked the loop open. “Part of the impetus was just to take ourselves out of that isolation, and go to the city and surround ourselves with our community—with old friends and new friends, people that we loved and admired,” Meek says. “Reconnecting with that community for this album and then expanding that even further. It felt like a continuation of where we started—like we rediscovered who we were, who we are now, through the reflection of our community. And really, the music was almost just the byproduct of that.”

And what a community it was: Laraaji, the New Age legend, set his zither and drones humming. Bassist Joshua Crumbly laid down a supple low end. Mikey Buishas worked tape loops and keys. Percussionists Mikel Patrick Avery, Jon Nellen, and Caleb Michel rotated through rhythms, while Adam Brisbin added guitar textures. Voices from Hannah Cohen, June McDoom, and Alena Spanger threaded themselves through the songs. The room filled and filled until no unwanted echoes remained. “There was so much density happening that it was actually a very un-self-conscious experience,” Meek reminisces. “You’re not really listening to yourself, you’re just forced to listen to everybody else. But then everyone’s doing that simultaneously, so it’s like no one‘s listening to themselves; they’re just listening to this group mind and naturally falling into a slot.”

This “groupthink” uniformity might sound stifling, but Meek found it anything but. It was freeing in a way that their previous attempts in that “vacuum” never quite reached, and that freedom is something they plan to take with them, even when they’re playing as just a trio again, or even by themselves. It’s a mindset, Meek explains, and it’s their main takeaway from this record: the real new direction here isn’t sonic, but philosophical. “Really, I think now we’re just in the pursuit of feeling free,” Meek says. “And it’s not a repeatable formula. Every time you sit down to make something, there’s a new answer to the question: ‘How do I feel free right now?’”

Krivchenia agrees, saying he felt a palpable relief in the “lack of ego in the room”: “To be honest, we’ve all had Big Thief sessions where we have massive ego flare ups and we’re really holding on to some idea and we’re all just butting heads hard. It’s not fun, and you don’t make great music that way. But this session—no one was nitpicking. No one was like, ‘Oh, if only I had played something…,’ because everyone was just listening to the whole thing.”

Big Thief’s reputation often suggests seamless unity; four souls pressed shoulder to shoulder. The reality, Meek insists, is messier—and that’s a good thing. “Friction isn’t failure, it’s an engine. It’s what makes a band.” Compromise is a part of the process, but “it’s not an equal-part system.” It shouldn’t be everyone watering down all their opinions in order to meet in the middle, sanding songs down via perpetual appeasement. As a result, the group isn’t democratic (or even monarchical) in a strict sense; passion often trumps consensus and “authority.” “We’re swayed by whoever is the most passionate about something,” Krivchenia laughs. “Like, if it’s two against one, that doesn’t mean we go with the two. Because if that one person says, ‘This my favorite fucking part of the song; this the hill I will die on,’ then that’s what you listen to.” (That being said, you can’t die on every hill. Meek adds: “You’ll run out of hall passes eventually.”)

At the center of that dynamic, inevitably, is Adrianne Lenker. Though she was unavailable for our conversation, both Meek and Krivchenia don’t hesitate to describe her as the band’s gravitational pull: primary songwriter, visionary, leader. The process, though, is always one of dialogue. “We are all also very stubborn and opinionated,” Meek grins. “Often what happens is James and I might throw out a thought for a lyric or something, and maybe it just cauterizes her original idea—‘No, actually, now I know for sure that what I wrote was better’—but we’ve built trust to the point where, in some ways, we know her more than she knows herself.” In the wake of Oleartchik’s departure, he explains, that trust had to solidify more than ever before—and as a result, Double Infinity marks the first time songs have been co-written by the whole band, with four tracks (”Grandmother,” “Happy With You,” “How Could I Have Known,” and “Los Angeles”) credited jointly to Lenker, Meek, and Krivchenia.

Meek and Krivchenia had long been embedded in Lenker’s writing process, offering feedback, nudging lyrics, and steering structures, but now there’s a greater comfort between all three of them that allows for the vulnerability needed to stare at a blank page together—or, worse, read out a filled one. Writing, Krivchenia notes, can feel exposing, borderline humiliating in its vulnerability. And Lenker’s work, for all its abstraction, is inherently personal. “It’s like a living journal of her human experience,” Meek explains. He fondly describes her process, as he’s witnessed it from the outside more times than he can count. It’s a study in intuition, it seems; mumbled syllables coalescing into words, abstract shapes crystallizing into songs.

The title Double Infinity followed a similar path. “For some reason, two eights kept appearing in our lives. It was, like, a numerology thing,” Meek says.” They then named their “scrappy little studio in the woods” after the motif, which then became the working title for the record before the song itself even existed (in fact, according to Meek, that song was written remarkably late in the game). It was something of a backwards process, rooted in intuition more than linear logic. The rest of the album functioned similarly: “We didn’t have a specific sound in mind, it was more just a feeling,” Krivchenia says. “We had all these paradoxes. We wanted to find the magic in the moment, but make it bigger than that too. We wanted it to be expansive but also close, something you feel in your body and not just as some vague, washy thing.”

It wasn’t until the mixing process that the band realized just how full the music felt. Krivchenia recalls listening to the album in full after the session with the band and feeling somewhat taken aback. “We were a little like, ‘Whoa. There’s…a lot going on. We kind of needed some time to parse through it.” Listeners who heard the record for the first time this past Friday probably felt something kindred. It’s the kind of album that grows on you, less immediate than their previous work but deeply intentional.

It’s hard to overstate how important a role intuition plays in Big Thief’s process. Every word, note, and feeling seems to be run through an intuitive barometer—one that measures less what sounds good than what feels right, feels true. “Trusting your intuition will usually translate pretty well, in that what I like probably isn’t that different from what other people like,” Krivchenia says, then frowns and immediately backtracks. “But, you also can’t really project what other people will like, you know?” All you can do is trust your gut. But even then, intuition is undoubtedly only the second most crucial throughline. Unsurprisingly, something else tops the band’s metaphorical list: “The most important thing,” Meek offers, “is that you just love your band members and feel at home with them. After all, your musicality will evolve—quickly, uncontrollably, whether you want it to or not—but your chemistry, that’s embedded.”

Strikingly, the sentiment is a near echo (albeit an unintentional one) of Lenker’s lyrics on the title track. “At the bridge of two infinities / What is forming, what is fading,” Lenker sings. Then: ”Deep within the center of the picture / Is the One I love / The eye behind the essence / Still, unmovable, unchanging.” Those are the lines the initial press release ended with: it posits that at that bridge of in-betweens, solace can be found in that which lies outside of time, that sole constant affixed in place in our perennially mutating world—and asks, “Is it love?” Perhaps. But Big Thief has another constant, one that is stranger and more mundane and has haunted me since I first stumbled upon it in 2018: every album that has ever been uploaded to their Bandcamp has carried the same five tags—“rock,” “alternative,” “New York,” “love songs,” and, inexplicably, “sock.”

When I bring it up, both Krivchenia and Meek burst into laughter. “What?” Krivchenia says. “I didn’t even know that. But I like the idea of our genre being sock. Alternative sock.” Meek shakes his head, eyes darting offscreen as he tries to summon a memory. “Love song and sock… I don’t know the answer. I don’t know. It’s probably some harebrained thing we did in, like, Brooklyn in 2012.” Then he pauses, smiles to himself. “It does sound like an obscure Adrianne joke, actually.”

The day Double Infinity was released, I checked Big Thief’s Bandcamp, braced for disappointment—surely they’d quietly retired the tag after all these years, now that they’ve finally become aware of its existence. But there it was: sock, still holding steady. Lenker sings of love as the eye behind the essence, unmoving amid change. In practice, the band’s version of it is humbler, more mundane: edible drumsticks, passionate hill-dying, an unretired tag no one bothers to fix. Despite everything, the center holds. Sock remains.

Casey Epstein-Gross is an Assistant Music Editor at Paste. Her work can be read in Observer, Jezebel, and elsewhere. She is based in New York and can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television and film, music, politics, and any number of opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on X (@epsteingross) or email her at [email protected].

How Big Thief Found Itself Again

After bassist Max Oleartchik’s departure, Adrianne Lenker, Buck Meek, and James Krivchenia opened their borders on Double Infinity and discovered an identity elastic enough to hold multitudes.