Adrianne Lenker’s family escaped a cult when she was just 4 years old; with the release of Big Thief’s third album, U.F.O.F., Lenker has solidified her place at the helm of a cult of her own.
Adrianne Lenker makes believers out of everyone. A brilliant songwriter and cubist-style lyricist, deconstructing an experience from multiple angles, she can give voice to anyone’s painful memories by putting her agony into words and leaving ample room in the narrative for the listener to project their own details. She blows up ordinary moments by locating and detonating their kernels of universal significance. She has a knack for threadbare and skeletal emotional honesty, wringing truth from simple observations and mundane interactions. With Big Thief’s third album U.F.O.F. (U.F.O. Friend), the Brooklyn-based 4-piece of Lenker (guitar, vox), Buck Meek (guitar), Max Oleartchik (bass) and James Krivchenia (drums) forge a still deeper bond with their rabid fans, digging further into familiar themes of impermanence, letting go, birth and death, while constraining the volume to a whisper for the band’s subtlest and most complex album yet.
Lenker’s ability to switch points of view within a song and peer through multiple sets of eyes mimics the rapid perspective-shifting of a dreamer. As a child, Lenker remembers regularly asking her parents if she was dreaming, perceiving her own life as an external observer. Suggestions in the lyrics give permission for the listener to process their own awful possibilities. Is “From” about rape? Is “Open Desert” describing an abusive relationship? Is “Terminal Paradise” a reverie on death? Lenker is in a quantum state of both open and closed: listeners recognize themselves in her lyrics, but she plays coy with the details, remaining relatable but ultimately inscrutable and building enormous trust with Big Thief fans over the span of their three albums.
But Lenker takes it a step further, and it’s the reason a cult is forming around her. She not only adeptly gives voice to everyday and extraordinary pain, suffering and trauma; she shoulders the responsibility for the absolution of everyone’s role in causing that pain: herself, her ancestors, the audience, everyone. Lenker told UK’s The Independent last week, “It feels like an old, old piece of pain that I’m needing to face and transmute.” She’s doing the work on behalf of her entire family tree, as a proxy for her multi-generational ancestral lineage. She’s embracing an acceptance of the darkness within and repairing these breeches on everyone’s behalf. She goes on to say, “I’ve been thinking lately how I have these certain wounds inside of myself, and if I don’t heal them, they will control me. The only thing that will work to change and transform this energy is if I show it love, not just more rejection, more abandonment.” Trauma is stockpiled and passed down through generations, and Lenker is aiming to truncate it. When most people recognize how damaged they are thanks to the myriad failings of their predecessors, they struggle to get much beyond anger. Not Lenker. She wants to root out the source of her pain and give it recognition and love, to heal not only herself but the very people who put the pain into her in the first place, and also the people who put the pain in them before that. And she makes Big Thief fans feel like she can do it for them, too.
U.F.O.F. accepts that all things are impermanent and must be let go of, and it celebrates childhood imagination, even in light of its inevitable disappearance – in light of everything’s inevitable disappearance: childhood, relationships, the physical body. Big Thief themselves are always moving, touring relentlessly since they began in 2015 (and Lenker and Meek as a duo for a few years before that), their own mossless existence a paragon of the inevitability of change and the necessity of embracing the unknown. The theme of letting go is touched upon throughout the album, but nowhere more earnestly than in “Terminal Paradise”: “warm / so warm / screaming in the field / as i was born / worm, / will you return me / to the robin’s beak? / i’ll be a bird.”
The theme of supernatural power on U.F.O.F. points to Lenker’s robust childlike imagination. Most people lose their sense of the supernatural as they complete the yawning drift into adulthood — even most of those that retain the rituals and superstitions of their religion can no longer perceive its fantastic supernatural underpinnings. Lenker still has it. As she told Exclaim, “There is all this incredible supernatural magic going on everywhere all the time, but we get used to it, so we kind of stop experiencing the raw essence and energy of everything.” U.F.O.F. explores the band’s keen interest in what they call “the cosmic, celestial realm,” especially in songs like the not-quite title track “UFOF” and its fond farewell to an alien companion.
Big Thief have been painstakingly developing trust with their growing fanbase over their two early full-lengths, and after finding themselves abruptly blowing up with the release of Masterpiece and Capacity, are now determined to maintain their sensitivity to and openness with their audience. Their success seems to come from getting quieter, making their audience lean in. Big Thief have secrets to tell, and U.F.O.F. pulls the listener into their confessional. Big Thief have taken the seeds of introspection that we caught glimpses of on Masterpiece and which showed up in a strong minority of tracks on Capacity and zeroed in on that characteristic, building an album around that subtlety of expression.
Gone is the robust upbeat rock scaffolding of Masterpiece and Capacity, with their varied dynamics on which to hang morose tales. U.F.O.F. is uniformly haunting; genteel fingerpicking, subtle suggestions of bass, tasteful complex percussion with Krivchenia turning the beat around seemingly every handful of measures. Lenker’s 2018 solo album abysskiss must be included in the progression also – as she told The Fader, “I just wrote fluidly throughout the course of two years. I didn’t really make the distinction which songs were for which project.” The solo album feels like a stable bridge between Capacity and U.F.O.F. Ever present is Lenker’s deft storytelling, weaving suggestive narrative arcs with her vocals front and center, keeping the tracks aloft.
Big Thief recorded the 12-track collection in rural western Washington at Bear Creek Studios, tracking live with engineer Dom Monks and the producer of their entire discography thus far, Andrew Sarlo. They signed with 4AD after releasing their two previous albums on Saddle Creek and had even more resources at their disposal for recording this album. They were finally able to luxuriate in a relatively endless timespan for recording – they took an entire month to demo and another month to record, an opportunity they had never previously been afforded. After years of rigorous touring, they relished this time to hold still together.
Although most of U.F.O.F. was written on the road prior to recording, two of the album’s three singles, “Cattails” and “Century,” with its potent steely insistence that “we have the same power,” were written in the studio. According to the press release, Lenker brought “Cattails” to Krivchenia and he “sat at the drums and we practiced and by the time we’d finished practicing, Dom Monks – our engineer – had already sneakily set up mics and recorded it.” The album’s first single, the almost-title-track “UFOF” involves Lenker’s trademark fingerpicked acoustic guitar dancing around whispered vocal harmonies. In lead-off track “Contact,” Lenker’s languid vocal harmonies give way to her full-throated scream toward the end, signifying birth or waking up from a stupefying depression.
The first among Lenker’s believers are the rest of the band, and she takes utmost care of Big Thief’s members. The band are the focus and centerpiece of U.F.O.F. – this is apparent in the album artwork, which is a new family photo with an almost religious composition. The band’s members grace the cover of a Big Thief album for the first time, following old family photos featuring Lenker’s mother (Masterpiece) and uncle (Capacity). The key to their interpersonal success seems to be their prioritizing of open communication above all else. It’s hard to overstate the challenge of maintaining a tight bond under the pressures of road life, especially considering the pace of their output and the relentlessness of their touring schedule, but the weight that the band gives to open communication keeps them close and trusting in each other. After recording U.F.O.F., the four members went their separate ways for five weeks — their longest stretch apart since they started this journey together – before reuniting to tour on their strongest material yet.
Lenker’s backstory is fascinating, from her repressed cult-confined early childhood to her budding teenage pop stardom, abandoned once she gained enough agency (and discovered Elliott Smith), to her elite training at Berklee College of Music. But all of that is prologue. Big Thief are three chapters in to a spectacular story with the potential to become a lifelong epic, and Lenker has built up enough trust and goodwill that Big Thief can be confident that their growing cult of followers will hang on their every move, eagerly awaiting each step on the journey for years to come.
