This week in Staff Picks, Staff Writer Emma Keates checks in with Big Thief post-“interpersonal issues,” and Editor-In-Chief Danette Chavez recommends a fizzy treat of a biopic.
Emma Keates: Big Thief, Double Infinity
Big Thief could not have come up with a better name for their latest album than Double Infinity. The Brooklyn folk outfit’s work has always had an innate timelessness to it, but it’s never felt so expansive—nor so intimate—as it does on the new record. That feeling is partly a function of Double Infinity‘s unusual recording process. Until 2024, the band had been an almost preternaturally close quartet—so much so, that founding bassist Max Oleartchik commented that they had almost “melted into each other” in a 2019 interview with the Los Angeles Times. That was before Oleartchik parted ways with the band last year for what both parties have attributed exclusively to “interpersonal issues,” leaving vocalist-guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, and drummer James Krivchenia to forge ahead as a trio.
One might think that this downsizing would make the music feel smaller in turn, but Oleartchik’s absence turned out to be incredibly generative for the band. Instead of merely finding a new bassist, the band invited 10 musicians, including prominent new age artist Laraaji, to riff and improvise and play (in multiple senses of the word) on some basic concepts they’d previously written over the course of three weeks’ worth of recording sessions. The resulting album feels like community personified, captured on stereo. On Double Infinity, the band’s previously tight instrumentations give way to a lush and, at times, almost otherworldly cacophony of sound and feeling. Despite her keen lyricism, Lenker has always used her voice as an instrument—just one piece of the larger puzzle. That practice is particularly effective here as she investigates the ways words often fail to capture the strongest of emotions. “I find you in a cafe/We proceed to only half-say,” she sings on “Words” before her voice is swallowed up by a chorus of others. She doesn’t need to finish the sentence; we already know—or rather, we can feel—how it ends. The next track, “Los Angeles,” begins with warm, overlapping laughter, presumably from the artists in the studio. In that moment, it’s as poignant as any lyric.
This is an album that will make you want to grab a guitar or a tambourine or even one of those little egg shakers and sing around a campfire with your closest friends. It will make you want to splash in a river or run through a field at sunset or fall in love. Even for Big Thief newbies, this is one that may stick with you for what feels longer than forever.
Danette Chavez: Sounds Of Summer (Viaplay, September 18)
My watch list of late has taken me from 19th-century Hawaii to 20th-century Italy, and from 1970s Germany to present-day South Korea. The latest stop on my international virtual tour is Halmstad, a midsize city in Sweden and the setting for a sunny biopic about the formation of one of the country’s most enduring pop groups. Directed by Per Simonsson, Sounds Of Summer tells the first chapter in the story of Gyllende Tider, the winsome Swedish band founded by Per Gessle (later of Roxette, and, at least once a decade since their split in the 1980s, Gyllende Tider). The film, which will be available on Viaplay beginning September 18, is fairly conventional but, like any good pop tune, is nonetheless catchy. Per (Valdemar Wahlbeck) is introduced as an introspective music nerd who breaks out of his shell after watching a single live-music performance. The music and lyrics flow quickly from there, and Per builds his band—Mats “MP” Persson (Ville Lövgren), Micke Syd Andersson (Phoenix Parnevik), Anders Herrlin (Lancelot Hedman Graaf), Göran Fritzon (Xawier Kulas)—with not much more difficulty.
Unlike a lot of musician biopics, Sounds Of Summer mostly avoids heaviness, preferring to keep things as light as the songs performed by the band at its core. The Per Gessle of this film isn’t so much a tortured genius as he is a somewhat lonely guy who understands better than most how music connects us. He forms a band to get the songs out of his head and into the world, and ends up making his first real friends. Gyllende Tider’s success is never really in doubt, not even during a disappointing trip to Stockholm. But that just leaves more time to listen to flirty, now-classic tracks like “Flickorna på TV2” (“The Girls On TV2”) and the perennial hit “Sommartider.” “This song will haunt us every summer for decades,” muses a music executive at EMI about the latter song, and, apocryphal or not, the observation wasn’t wrong; “Sommartider” charted in Sweden multiple times throughout the ’80s. Even now, it pops back up cyclically, like visitors returning to their favorite beach town. And Gyllende Tider reunites with similar regularity, still playing to huge crowds. Sounds Of Summer goes down like a lemonade that’s on the sweeter side, but after all, it is still summer for another nine days.
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