Big Thief’s ‘Double Infinity’ Dares You to Feel Wrong

A voice slides out of the speakers like smoke from a collapsing star. It’s familiar—Adrianne Lenker, raw and spiraling—but something about it feels corrupted. As if the language she once used to hold the world together has now turned on her. “Incomprehensible,” Big Thief’s latest offering, is not just a title. It’s a manifesto, a dare, a challenge scrawled in static. And it is the first haunted whisper of Double Infinity, a record that sounds like it was stitched together in the afterlife of folk rock and electro-acoustic hallucinations.

You don’t listen to this band anymore—you enter them, you absorb them. But Double Infinity demands a different kind of devotion. It doesn’t welcome; it tests.

This Is Not a Concept Album—It’s a Collapse

Big Thief has always been hard to pin down. One moment, they’re pastoral. The next, they’re pouring battery acid into the banjo. But this new project takes the fragmentation even further. The band announced a double album, 80 minutes long, 24 tracks, sprawling across genres like an unmedicated dream sequence. The result? Something intentionally broken. A sonic Rorschach test. You don’t decode Double Infinity—you project into it.

Their single “Incomprehensible” drifts between words like ghosts through walls—half spoken, half sung, and entirely unsettled. One fan online called it “a séance more than a song.” It feels true. Because maybe the album isn’t trying to be heard. Maybe it wants to haunt.

And here’s the part that should unsettle us most: they know exactly what they’re doing.

A Band in Rebellion, or in Ruin?

Lenker, never one for pretense, once said, “Clarity is a luxury we don’t always need.” It was an offhand remark in an old interview, but Double Infinity now makes it sound like prophecy. This isn’t clarity. It’s refusal. It’s what happens when a band no longer cares whether you understand, only whether you feel. And not feel good—just feel anything real.

But there’s a darker layer. Is this avant-garde brilliance or just a band unraveling in public? Have they ascended into something mythic—or are they simply exhausted with meaning, with structure, with trying? What is a double album, really, in the era of algorithmic singles and 15-second attention spans? It feels less like a release and more like an act of rebellion. Or grief.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s the point. Maybe Double Infinity isn’t an album at all. Maybe it’s a slow-motion implosion disguised as art. And we—the listeners, the critics, the culture—are left standing in the dust cloud, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.

But who said meaning was ever the goal?