Big Thief — staggered and tired — head for the top of the mountain

A little sweetness is nice, but Adrianne Lenker knows when it’s too much for her. “You should have mine,” the Big Thief singer and guitarist says to her bandmate Buck Meek, who plays lead guitar, sliding over her iced coffee. “I can’t drink the sugar.”

Lenker makes this kind of assessment often, in one form or another. When writing and performing with the group, she’ll sometimes turn her nationally delicate voice into a snarl or a howl — resisting any temptation to ever let it all get too sweet. “Swallow poison, swallow sugar,” she sings on the Big Thief song “All Night All Day,” from the new album “Double Infinity.” “Sometimes they taste the same.” Getting complacent with an excess of a good thing, she perpetually seems to be reminding herself, can be deadly.

The restaurant — Kurrypinch in Thai Town — is one of Meek’s favorites, and he’s more than happy to oblige in taking the drink off Lenker’s hands. (All three Big Thief members have dabbled with the L.A. area, but only Meek lives here full time.) Rounded out by drummer James Krivchenia, the cosmic folk act has tucked themselves into a corner table, and, at a glance, appear as some of the most unassuming rock stars you will ever find. Soft-spoken, polite to waitstaff, engaged with each other without ever so much as glancing at a phone.

But there are hippie-ish artist quirks if you start to look closer. Krivchenia’s tattered shirt appears older than he is (36), and Lenker has a gold tooth that flashes when she smiles (the result of a bicycle accident many years ago). “Look what we got for later,” says Meek, 38, who keeps his sunglasses on (“the Michael Jordan Oakleys that I always wanted as a kid”), triumphantly pulling a grand slice of ahi tuna out of his backpack. There are oohs and aahs.

The plan is to cook the fish up later tonight at rehearsal, where Big Thief is getting ready for a tour that will bring the members to the largest headlining show of their career at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday — a remarkable achievement for a band that’s hardly a household name. But its fanbase is loyal — obsessive, even — having figured Lenker to be one of the great songwriters of her generation. “To be honest, I’m nervous to play these big shows,” Lenker, 34, admits to me as we make our way through shared plates of Sri Lankan food.

Big Thief’s new album, “Double Infinity,” experiments boldly with song structure, drawing both criticism and praise for its unconventional approach.

(Alex Viscius)

It’s been a steady climb thus far — just continuous momentum, one critically adored album after another, until bam: They’re playing the Bowl the night before John Legend. “That’s actually one of the most trippy things,” Krivchenia says, “where it’s like, ‘Real love!’’’ — referencing the refrain from the band’s second-ever single, from 2016 — “and I’ll just be, like, peeing in a Panera in Ohio.”

Lingering nerves aside, Lenker has been doing this long enough that she doesn’t doubt the band’s ability to leap into the next level. “We started out burning CDs and writing all the titles on paper bags,” she says. “Living out of the van — we did that for years.” She remembers the “thousands of handshakes and hugs and home-cooked meals” and nights spent sleeping on floors. “We were ready for every step of it by the time we got there.”

Meek actually feels like the challenge for Big Thief at a certain point was to keep it from not growing — at least too fast. He says there have been offers — that’s offers, with an s — from major labels, which the band has turned down in order to maintain creative control. “The work,” he figures, “was trying to keep it close to the ground and navigate the outside world, beyond our little collective of trusted collaborators.”

This well-established close-knit nature of the group’s DNA is why the rollout for “Double Infinity” has been surprisingly wrought, at least by Big Thief’s standards. The band survived a literal divorce at one point — Lenker and Meek were married for a few years until 2018 — navigating that split with a public grace that would make Fleetwood Mac’s head spin. But they couldn’t figure out how to keep going with their longtime bass player, Max Oleartchik, whose time with the band ended in 2024. The news came not all that long after Big Thief announced, and then subsequently canceled, a pair of 2022 concerts in Tel Aviv, Israel, where Oleartchik was born and raised.

Whether Oleartchik left on his own terms is not especially clear. The announcement cited “interpersonal reasons,” and the band, now a trio, has patiently, repeatedly insisted in interview after interview over the last few months that the decision was not about Israel, but rather just a matter of growing apart, not unlike a romantic breakup. (Oleartchik could not be reached for comment.)

Regardless of how or why, anyway, it’s a new era for Big Thief. And with a leg of its chair suddenly gone, they responded by enlisting a number of guest musicians to serve as reinforcements in the studio during the making of “Double Infinity,” like bassist Joshua Crumbly, who will be joining the band on tour, and revered new age musician Laraaji. It’s a swirling, buoyant album that wrestles with the insufficiencies of language to capture the complexity of the human experience — complexities like, say, why a friend and collaborator you’ve spent a decade with had to go his separate way.

“Words are tired and tense / Words don’t make sense,” Lenker sings on “Words.” “Why do I have to explain myself,” she asks again and again on “Happy With You.” “Let me be incomprehensible,” she pleads on “Incomprehensible.” (That last song, if you read the tea leaves of the lyrics, was written on July 7, 2024; the announcement that Oleartchik was out of the band came four days later, on July 11, 2024.)

“Thank you,” Meek says, half joking with relief when I say that I don’t see the need to ask about the breakup with Oleartchik again, since they’ve repeated themselves enough to other journalists already. “Interviews are hard in general,” Krivchenia adds. “Like, having that reflection that’s not your music. The record is something I can stand by and be like, ‘I’m happy with that. That’s the most beautiful reflection of me. It’s me at my freest.’ Words are just harder.”

“Double Infinity” is an unpredictable record — a notable departure from the band’s previous work not just in its sonic richness but also in its desire to break the mold of how a rock song is “supposed” to be put together. One song, “Grandmother,” features Laraaji singing wildly and searchingly over the top of Lenker’s vocals. And two others, “No Fear” and “Happy With You,” repeat lyrics like mantras as the music builds around them, filling up over 11 minutes of music with just two stanzas of words. The album has received mostly strong reviews, but it’s been somewhat divisive all the same, facing more criticism than any other Big Thief album before. (“Wait till you hear the next one we already made,” Meek grins. “It’s not what you expect.”)

Both Lenker and Meek admit they’ve read some of the less-than-glowing reviews, even though they know they shouldn’t. “It’s definitely the evil eye,” Meek jokes. But they love the record, and that’s what matters. “Not having to put a bridge [in a song],” Lenker says, “letting ourselves repeat something 44 times because it feels good — that took this long to give ourselves the permission and freedom to be able to do. And I think in that expression there’s so much depth, if you’re looking for it, and if you’re paying attention.”

One critical review stuck with Lenker, though, which she remembers saying that the only thing “Double Infinity” has going for it “is that it’s uplifting.” “The thought that I had,” she says, getting animated, “was like, That is no small thing! In these times, if all we do is uplift? That’s amazing.”

In the name of not letting anything in the Big Thief world get too sweet, however, I tell Lenker that, as uplifting as the record is, there is one part that made me pretty sad. “Let’s get real,” she says, smiling, “just tell me.”

Following longtime bassist Max Oleartchik’s departure, Big Thief navigates a new era with guest musicians and creative reinvention.

(Alex Viscius)

I bring up the album closer, “How Could I Have Known,” a deep, somber campfire epic that recounts a trip to Paris, with Lenker standing in front of the Eiffel Tower and finding the iconic structure disappointingly “empty.” The song then takes her to the bridge on the Seine that used to be covered in tiny locks, which were put there by couples as symbols of their love. “It reminded me,” she sings, “of everyone I had ever tried to claim.” Hearing it brought me back to this terrible, suffocating feeling of when you’re traveling and seeing wonders of the world and it just doesn’t make you feel better.

“I thought [the Eiffel Tower] would be like, Ahhhh,” she says, remembering that trip. “But, like, it’s all lit up with fluorescent beams. These are just ideas. We’re living in the land of constructs, and that’s what this whole album is about — and that’s what all of our albums and all of the songs that we did get at. Like Neil Young says, it’s one song. Where is love, where is beauty? The true human spirit — where does that live? That’s something that we’ll be excavating our whole lives.”