Brooklyn, N.Y.
A Collective Sculpture


Adrianne Lenker is a courageous artist. The songs she writes for Big Thief deal with intimate feelings that are difficult to acknowledge. On Capacity, the band’s second album, she explores these emotions with the same quiet intensity the group brings to their live shows. “The things I’m talking about aren’t easy to express, unless the audience is right there with you,” Lenker says. “It’s challenging to step outside of ourselves in this way, but when the audience is truly listening and giving us so much love, it’s easy to concentrate on sharing these experiences. We’re not trying to put on a show or manipulate the crowd’s feelings. We just try to be as present as possible and feel what’s actually happening in the music and space we share with the listeners. Everyone in the band is sort of introverted, but we’re learning how to push out of it, to have a real exchange with our audience.” The quartet’s music occupies a wide sonic range. They move from quiet acoustic moments, featuring Lenker’s sparkling fingerpicking and intimate vocals, to jolting stabs of metallic, atonal noise, generated by guitarist Buck Meek and the muscular rhythm section of drummer James Krivchenia and bassist Max Oleartchik. The contrast of these extremes throughout Capacity gives the songs a gripping dynamic range. “The music is about the specific alchemy of the four of us. I bring in something and we all get together to work on the form. Everybody writes their own parts. It’s a collaborative process.” Capacity’s basic tracks were recorded a year ago, shortly after finishing Masterpiece, the band’s debut. They spent the next year adding and subtracting parts, and Lenker says they’re already working on another record. “It’s like being a painter. Once you finish a picture, you go on to the next piece. As soon as we were done with the bulk of Capacity, we were following our creativity and working on more songs.”