From Masterpiece to Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, Big Thief’s musical evolution feels like a gradual exfoliation of standard indie rock flourishes and tidy production towards something more visceral and (dare I say it) organic. Their live set at Glastonbury in 2022 for example, shows a band on the verge of near telepathic musical communication and is a must-see for anyone who has ever played in band. And if the pleasures of Big Thief are different in each era of their short career, their progression towards something truly timeless now seems clear enough.
Singer/songwriter Adrianne Lenker’s first solo album Songs dropped mid-pandemic. I’m pretty sure the majority of people you ask will tell you Taylor Swift’s Folklore was their uncanny pandemic album of 2020 – and good for them. But for many of us, it was Adrianne’s Songs and Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher that will forever mark the introspective surreality of that passage. When music of this depth works its way into your daily life, and you hear it again years later, the past has a tendency to replay with arresting vividity. The music we love becomes a kind of personal time machine.
And personal is how Bright Future lands for me. The songs and production choices here put us right in the room with Adrianne as she sings about dogs, mothers, dinner, love, loss, swimming, and other intangibles across a disarmingly plain canvas. I hear fingers on frets, muscles drawing horsehair across strings, and vocal cords meandering and harmonizing like a lazy day down at the creek.
For this record is above all else, music made by humans for humans. It encourages us to revel in our imperfect somatic being, to take that swim in the river while the water is still safe enough to hold us. And if the world feels like it’s gonna come off the environmental rails (and surely we are all part of the problem) the suggestion here is we should absolutely indulge the few moments of grace we are given. Because not only do these moments provide us with nourishment for difficulties ahead, they are a needed reassertion of human physicality and will into a landscape increasingly littered with digital signage, obsessive economic messaging, and the reduction of everything and everyone to a metric.
I remember the 1990s when the future sounded like it had arrived in the form of Aphex Twin, Orbital, Portishead, or the moment the bass drops on a jungle track. Digital production had matured and finally punched it’s way into the mainstream with sounds that were genuinely interesting. I recall thinking that the future of music would only be improved by fantastic new technologies, and that the web itself was destined to be a subaltern utopia of some sort.
Alas, that cheery sentiment now reads a bit like a back issue of Mondo 2000 on MDMA, teledildonics for the aural canal. Because these days, I’m seriously wondering what the hell it is we’re all going to be listening to when AI chatbots write the lyrics and a generative algorithm somewhere renders every instrument and vocal line perfectly.
Well, I have at least one answer for you – it is a woman in her kitchen singing songs with friends.