Brixton Academy, London, England – 23, 25 and 26 April 2026
‘Orthostatic Intolerance’ sounds like one of those Dragon New Warm Mountain songs that you don’t put on quite as often as ‘Certainty’. But it is, in fact, the reason my insane plan to see 12 Big Thief shows on the Somersault Slide tour became somewhat derailed (and why my fabled Hollywood Bowl pilgrimage last year bit the dust, and why everyone is so far away in these photos). Can’t stand up, you see. I’ve had health stuff since I was a teenager, but this is new. Hopefully temporary.
Life still has wonders in it, though, like five nights with my favourite band, squinting from my seat in the gods or on the accessible platform. It was, I’ll admit, a very different experience, and often a lesser one, but that’s OK. Nothing was ever going to match the Ireland shows from 2024 anyway, and two of these five nights were nevertheless spectacular. Big Thief are a live band if ever there was one.
This piece includes unpublished quotes from my recent i Paper interview with Adrianne and co.
***
Oslo: first night
Adrianne kicked off, solo, with the live debut of the greatest of her new songs, ‘What I Only Dream Of’ (later retitled ‘Cruel and Beautiful World’, though I prefer the original, more singular name). And, yes, there is still no feeling in life remotely comparable to Lenker unspooling some new song that sounds as old as the rocks, and feeling so miraculously blessed that you are among the first to ever hear it. (I, personally, would not have gone to grab another beer during such a moment, but there’s no accounting for the men of Oslo.)
“What I only dream of is waiting...,” sings Lenker with that slight catch in her throat, and I find that I have one too, as I always do in that pin-drop silence where the only sound on earth is her voice, backed by the gentlest of guitars, casting truth into the air.
When I interviewed the band last year, Adrianne explained her sense of composition as a multi-layered thing that has not altered, merely ascended. “I feel like I’ve always had these multiple different veins of writing: the simple and the small and the big and then the cosmic and then the literal, the physical, the macro and the micro… There’s all this going on simultaneously. I’ve just grown to a new level of it.”
In her online songwriting course earlier in 2025, she talked about the ‘key’ to her songs: not a musical key or a way to understanding them, but a key that she turns partway through, moving the subject matter from the intimate to the infinite. “Strangers’ eyes bring me alive,” she sings in ‘What I Only Dream Of’, grasping the key and turning it, “as I wade through the terrible wonder, the wonderful cruel and beautiful world.” It is an astonishingly beautiful song, just a touch short of her two greatest ballads, ‘Sadness as a Gift’ and ‘Already Lost’ (both, it is worth reiterating, heard best in their live solo iterations: perhaps at the Hammersmith and Edinburgh band shows of 2023).
Such majesty merely kicks off the night’s revelations, though when you open with a song like that, you’re erecting a glorious prism through which to see everything that follows.
The band are touring Double Infinity, an overproduced record of great songs, and eventually they’ll remember that, but tonight they include just one track off the album (the lead single, ‘Incomprehensible’, to close the main set). They play six newer songs, three of them for the first time. You could put this down to an appealing perversity, but I think it is simply a sign of an artist questing endlessly forward, and hewn to such folky, folksy maxims as Lenker’s oft-expressed, “If you write a song on tour, you have to play it.”
She follows the opener with ‘Forgive the Dream’, written during the North American dates, which can’t help but pale next to what came first, but casts a slighter spell of its own. It’s an elusive mood piece that conjures images of wintry industry and crushed expectations, as Lenker’s voice purposefully strains in and out of key, which isn’t my favourite thing she can do with it, but is always a gamble I admire, when being recorded for all eternity or else in front of a thousand people. As, indeed, is tossing out songs that your audience has never heard before.
I bumped into Dylan Meek, the brother of Big Thief guitarist, Buck, and support at three of these shows, at Brixton, and he told me Adrianne was putting aside a dedicated two hours for writing, every day of the tour. I tried to articulate to him what I wrote here about the feeling I get hearing those songs for the first time, and he said he gets it too. “And then you might never hear that song again,” he said, “or only four years later.”
Which brings us to ‘Wait a While’, a song I’ve written about several times, as it’s one of my favourites. It assumed a fabled place in the Big Thief narrative, after They debuted it in Bristol in 2022, played it four times (including Adrianne's heartstopping version during the famous Shepherd’s Bush run) and then put it back in the drawer. It poked its head out briefly once more when Buck joined Adrianne for one of her solo shows in 2024, and then suddenly here they were, playing it in Oslo. The gorgeous possibilities of what Adrianne's voice can do to the word “Hilary” are no longer apropos, since the chorus has morphed into the clunkier, “Wait a while, wait a while, don’t HU-rry" (perhaps because there is too synonymous a Hillary). Yet even with that dab less ethereality, being serenaded with it was the most glorious surprise.
‘Certainty’ is next, with Lenker and Meek gazing across the stage at each other throughout, these “deep friends” who once felt this romantic love for one another, and now feel it for other people, and wrote this masterpiece to capture the feeling.
And then things get heavy. A ferocious ‘Shoulders’ (a song I like but which Adrianne likes more) is followed by ‘Real Love’, which climaxes with an explosive, spitting guitar solo, though its real revelation is the way Lenker transforms this early rocker by singing it in a conversational tone, and in the fragile voice she usually reserves for her solo records. Throughout this show, she takes risks with that most mesmerizing of instruments: rolling the dice on improvised melodies, in heady communion with her muse and in tandem with Meek’s Texan quiver and Krivchenia’s unstudied high harmonies. ‘Real Love’ is followed by a relentlessly cyclical ‘Real House’ – ‘Fools Gold’ via Henry the Human Fly – which explodes into the live debut of the cathartic ‘Christmas Day’, being another chunk of confessional domestic sadness depicting the early life of Adrianne Lenker, though this one coming with a cacophonous chorus.
That’s topped by the best of her new rock songs, the rampaging ‘Beautiful World’, which has some of the most phonetically satisfying moments in her recent writing (not just the rhyme of “coffee and a bagel” with “Winnebago” but the glee with which she belts it out), and is the closest thing she’s ever written to a protest song. There are some curiously clunky lines in its third verse, but its balance of whimsy, humanism and rage, and the way it turns the key to shift us from a “fucked up world” to “a beautiful world”, while retaining the rest of the chorus (“Why must everything be conquered?”), is a very definite vision of genius. Its author’s conception of politics never seems to have strayed beyond the childlike, but the innocence at the centre of her art is an essential part of its iridescence. Townes Van Zandt had it too: “I don’t know why we can’t be brothers here,” he wrote in ‘High, Low and In Between’, “I know we should be.”
The band follow that with the live debut of ‘Mr. Man’, and the best of the five versions they'll play across these five shows. It’s a bit riot grrrl, a bit Belly, a bit Breeders, Lenker pouncing on the Iran crisis, backed by her insouciant slacker riff, though finding more profundity in an ellipticism that hints at solidarity or at life’s obstacles (“Could you get past two, could you get past three?”) than in the more literal later passages (“Hey, Mr. Man, with a plan, what’s the confusion/Trashing the land, ‘cause you can, just for amusement”). Directness in her work is so often a virtue, and tonight immediacy is a godsend, it’s just when you hear the song on four other nights that it seems to fall short of sustained greatness.
'Muscle Memory’ is the final new song, in which Adrianne articulates the blank adolescent feeling of post-orgasm clarity. Around it, she does ‘not a lot just forever’ with the band, and ‘anything’ without. She plays a conventional ‘Not’ and a new arrangement of ‘Vampire Empire’, then ends the set with ‘Incomprehensible’, which sounds great though will be even better by London. Last year, Lenker described the song to me as “like a journal entry or something”, and introduced it tonight by saying, “It’s a big time right now. And I suppose in some small way this song is just a call to be the wild thing that I am.”
The encore is ‘Change’, her incomparable song about life’s very meaning lying in its finite nature, which survives a stumbling start that almost serves to accentuate the song’s miraculousness, then turns first into a singalong, and then into an experiment in revised phrasing and spontaneous falsetto, before the familiar jam of the mundane-to-cosmic ‘Spud Infinity’ closes the show, the key in the lock once more.
Adrianne said she was almost “vibrating with nerves” but even by her standards she is sensational on this first night of the tour. She told me last year, “The most comfort I’ve felt from music in my life is through playing.” I felt that tonight. She would hit a similar but different peak on the Saturday in London.
***
Oslo: second night
Not the whole thing. But the first thing. Adrianne opening a show solo, with a sad song you’ve never heard before (and, at the time of writing, no-one has heard since), and it feeling like nothing else on Earth. She must know, right?
This time, it’s one we’ll call ‘Leaving Her’, since its chorus goes, “Leaving her gets harder every time.” (If we’re ranking the songs written since her last visit, I’d have it third after ‘What I Only Dream Of’ and ‘Beautiful World’, alongside ‘These Are the Days’). Fingerpicked arpeggios, a Karen Dalton-ish melody, and Lenker at her most sincere (“I am helpless in your glow”, she sings at one point, before simply crooning the words, “I love her, I love her”). Once more she is drawing a contrast between emotional pain and the illimitable beauty of creation, which extends to me and you.
She adds a delicate ‘heavy focus’ and a pleading ‘anything’, before plunging into an even heavier show than the previous evening. ‘Christmas Day’ is a grunge anthem tonight (weren’t they predominantly a country band the last time we saw them?); ‘Real Love’, ‘Not’ and ‘Vampire Empire’ all end in solos of squalling feedback; and a rampaging ‘Beautiful World’ is even better than the previous night, with Adrianne vocally inhabiting the alpha psychos of her first two choruses, prior to the song’s simple yet profound shift.
Four of the first five songs tonight are new, though such mixing-it-up will not be sustained, this evening or across the tour, as the last album creeps towards centre-stage. Double Infinity’s problem as a record – that it is overly busy – is almost instantly solved by the simple expedient of it being played by a four-piece band. (Meek told me last year that for him the key word to understanding the album was “play”: they invited a big group of musicians to come together, who heard the songs for the first time in the studio, at their microphones, “and everyone was responding intuitively and responding to each other and self-arranging very quickly, and just recording that”.) I wonder how many of Big Thief’s minor musical missteps have had to do with the politics of their bassist’s departure, and of an innate and ever-present desire for intra-band harmony. There was no real reason for them to record this record with a ton of musicians, nor for them to play festival shows in 2024 with two drummers, except to shield their new live bassist (Joshua Crumbley) from being the only new member; Big Thief have released just one poor song: ‘Grandmother’, off Double Infinity, which has the unfortunate distinction of filtering Adrianne's singular worldview through the chords of Status Quo and the generic fixations of Kiss, but presumably made the album because it was a full-band collaboration, and the limelight tends to fall on Lenker, which can’t be simple for any of them. We heard that song in Gunnersbury Park in 2025, where it took up a sixth of the set-time, and I thought something similar might happen with these shows, but no: we didn’t hear it once. Its position was arguably taken by an expansive ‘No Fear’, meditative to the point of rambling, more of which later.
In our interview, Adrianne described the latest album as “floaty, shimmery, uplifting, and faster than other records we’ve made”, saying that thematically it covered the same themes with which she was always preoccupied but “there’s a feeling that ties everything together”. On this second night, we get a thumping version of Double Infinity’s title track and its soundalike, ‘Los Angeles’, which highlights Lenker’s Lorenz Hart-like facility with a rhyme (“Los Angeles/You sang for me’), a current predilection of hers. When she explained the title track to me, she said its central phrase, “At the bridge of two infinities”, was “almost Orange-ish” in its obscurity, then half sang a snatch of that Two Hands album track: “Orange is the colour of my love…’”
‘Muscle Memory’ has extra verses tonight, apparently improvised. Then Lenker does ‘Simulation Swarm’ which is always ‘Sim Swarm’ on the setlist, such shorthand implying its centrality to Lenker’s own conception of her person as an artist, its lyrics alluding half-cryptically to the half-brother she’s never met, and its licks signalling to her status as one of our best living guitarists. It’s given a stunning reading tonight, flipping out into an insane second solo.
‘Real House’ might have been hypnotic but still doesn’t quite seem to work as a purposefully persistent dirge, though in any incarnation, it’s surely never going to approach her tear-streaked version in Kilkenny. While it’s an intensely personal song, she observed in our interview that “it’s funny how sometimes the more micro you get, the more macro it is. The more detailed you get, the more universal it is.”
For a while, Lenker and Krivchenia have been experimenting with a drum-and-vocal section in ‘Not’: creating that automatic rush of adrenalised exhilaration as the guitars rush back in. Tonight they try it in both ‘Not’ and ‘Vampire Empire’, but both feel slightly muted. Lenker may never write a more perfect song than ‘Not’, a thunderous Cole Porter-ish list song that makes its point through endless negation, but for the more obsessive fans, it needs (like a good cover version) to be something extra or something different, since we’ve heard it so many, many times. Here it’s neither, for the longest while, only for its heavy, formless solo to turn into an almost laidjack, Layla-ish jam full of gentle noodling, which is really nice, and gives the song some closure to go with its catharsis.
‘Mr. Man’ sounds ever more like Lenker proving she can do what boygenius do, 10 times better with her eyes closed (they offered her the chance to join, she does not appear to have taken them up on it, but then would Springsteen have joined McBusted?). Last night it was Adrianne inhabiting the bolshie spirit of riot grrrl, but tonight Buck gets more involved, coming in with loud vocal harmonies and a sprinkling of sparkling notes (remember when he tossed those onto ‘Ruined’ at Hammersmith in 2023, and how good it sounded? He'd do the same to 'Sim Swarm' too, on the first night at Brixton).
Just as great is a gorgeous ‘Promise Is a Pendulum’, a song in which Lenker edges towards the twee and repetitive but somehow falls into some space of wonder through sheer sense of conviction. She wraps the main set once more with a brilliant take on ‘Incomprehensible’, even better than the first night, its prelude (‘Incomprehensible... incomprehensible... incomprehensible... Let me be’) suddenly seeming to hint at a debt to Macca. Her talent stretches the farthest way, further than any songwriter still working, then occasionally snaps or falls over. Here she is toying around with the melody, finding brilliant new nuances in her delivery, then strains too far, her vocal turning flat and discordant. She goofs off to cover her embarrassment, as the others race in to obscure her blushes. The encore is ‘Forgive the Dream’, b/w ‘Masterpiece’, the latter pitched somewhere between the anthemic and conversational readings that Lenker will usually choose between. “How was it?” texts a friend. “First night: 11/10. Tonight: 9/10,” I reply, then tell them some of the above.
***
London: first night
I had griped to myself in Oslo that ‘Vampire Empire’ was like Suede’s ‘Beautiful Ones’ or the Manics’ ‘If You Tolerate This’: a great band’s signature song that to me feels not just mannered and shallow alongside their best work, but essentially unillustrative, being resented by some diehards for that reason and by others because it’s emblematic of the jump to arenas, and the distancing that creates. Yet tonight, suddenly, the song works. I’ve never heard it even half as good, nor half as triumphal. It is, after all, and for all of ‘Not’’s off-kilter profundity, the band's first howl-it-at-the-sky anthem, their first anthem in any conventional, mass-appeal sense, and despite that seeming like the sort of thing I wouldn’t like at all: how I did. Lenker clearly loved the spectacle of those five minutes too, turning fleetingly into one of those pop princesses who lets the audiences do half the work.
If the show lacks the profundity of that first night of the tour, the experience still shimmers in the South London air.
***
London: final night
It’s certainly true that the setlist is largely shorn of surprises, which I hope is to do with the demands of a new bassist and a guest star, rather than a sign of relative conformity to come. Travelling home, it occurs to me that, so far on the tour, and accounting of course for music’s utter subjectivity, across these five shows they haven’t played either of the two best songs on the most recent album (‘All Night All Day’ and ‘How Should I Have Known’), just as Adrianne didn’t play two of Bright Future’s most revolutionary numbers (‘Evol’ and ‘Ruined’) across the UK and Ireland tour that shared its name.
When I asked the band about the process of concocting their setlists (traditionally a task led by Krivchenia), Meek described it as “pretty somatic”, and Lenker said it was “based on how we feel”, with Krivchenia adding, “Which could be anything: a specific mood we’re in, or just people throwing out songs, saying, ‘That one would sound good next. It’s intuitive.” In Meek’s words: “Sometimes it’s what we feel like that town or that crowd is wanting that night, then it becomes something reciprocal, or sometimes it’s just for us: ‘Whaddo we wanna do tonight?’ I think we’re just trying to be present and play what we wanna play … set ourselves free.”
On the balcony tonight, the demand is for the Spotify Top Songs. During the show that I’d missed, Adrianne had reportedly led a plodding 15-minute version of ‘No Fear’ that seemed to enrage not only the casual fans but several of the diehards. It was inevitable, given that reaction, that she would try again. Not, I would imagine, as an act of aggressive contrarianism, but because she had had an artistic idea that hadn’t yet come off. In her 2025 online songwriting course, she talked about the idea of ‘drone’ songs, where the artist forces us to meditate on a single phrase. This is her clearest expression yet within that subform (in our interview, Meek and Krivchenia compared the song to ‘Happy with You’, in the sense that adding words would have diluted its meaning), and it promptly proceeds to lose most of the crowd, as much as one can tell a thing like that. Knowing the intention does help, though, and after being at first intrigued by the concept, and then amused by how incredibly bored the people around me have become (some gazing about themselves in the hope of finding something more entertaining upon which to fix their attention, some simply leaving), the song begins to work its loping and cyclical magic upon me.
Despite departing with a vaguely unsatisfied feeling that I’m not sure I’ve ever from a Big Thief show before, this one is still worth it a thousand times over for the echoes of ‘Change’ and ‘Time Escaping’ from the previous night, for the Beach Boys’-ish ‘Casual Touch’ (which worked despite Adrianne playing the majority of in the wrong key; she likes the song, as she said), and one of those instances of alchemy with which live music in general and this artist in particular can suddenly floor you: a deeply beautiful, solo ‘not a lot just forever’, a song I’ve heard countless times live, but never loved like I do tonight. Amid a little plodding and a fair amount repetition, those four minutes are just breathtaking.
***
London: third night
Life doesn’t have to be linear, you know. Nor writing. Why not climax with how night three made us feel?
The idea of the ‘guitar god’, beloved to rock magazines of a certain vintage, who use phrases like ‘of a certain vintage’, is one that has never meant much to me. Perhaps briefly near the end of ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’, or whenever I hear the Hammersmith Odeon version of ‘Sultans of Swing’. But give me voices, and words. This evening, though... well.
Because Big Thief on the Saturday at Brixton is hereafter the ‘guitar god’ show. Adrianne is, in the urban parlance, on one tonight. “Euphoric,” says my mate Peter, which says it. There are astounding versions of ‘Incomprehensible’ and ’Words’ to open, the latter spiked with blasts of six-string. (In our interview, she described the song as referencing “this whole other world that’s with you that is non-verbal … this whole universe that is wordless”.)
There is the new metal coda to ‘Christmas Day’, a frenzy of headbanging. There is the fingerpicking that dances around the duelling voices on the Fleetwood Mac-ish ‘These Are the Days’. An exuberant ‘Sim Swarm’, its second solo now scraping the ceiling with fuzz. My favourite version of ‘Change’ since the legendary one (when Adrianne walked back on alone at the end of the Shepherd’s Bush run in 2022 and sang it solo, and I never felt afraid of death in the same way after that). During it, she raises her arms to dance, and touches her heart. There’s a stunning ‘Time Escaping’, a ‘Beautiful World’ that comes marauding out of the traps, and a ‘Vampire Empire’ in which Lenker pulls away from the mic to encourage the crowd to belt out entire verses: maybe it’s the “falling” that brings the crowd to this song, maybe it’s the articulation of the soft butch experience, or of mystifying seesaw relationships more broadly. Whatever it is, the place crackles.
And when you take as many risks as they are tonight, things fail too. You experiment by adding Laraaji’s incongruous murmurings to ‘anything’ and it doesn’t work. You embark on a frenetic ‘Not’ and find that you’ve twice misplaced the words. You select ‘Red Moon’ for the encore, giving solo spots to a couple of the band’s brothers, only to find it’s a self-indulgent, haphazard, under-rehearsed mess. You start a guitar break and your ex-husband has to wander across the stage and flick the switch on your amp. You start some freeform experimental poetry in the calm after ‘These Are the Days’ and, yes, you’re the greatest living writer but this isn’t much of anything at all. Yet more often than not you’re in this space where you aim for the heavens and find them far beneath your feet.
Jake Tilson wrote the next day: “Adrianne’s solos were really on fire. When she starts, you never quite know if she’ll land on that perfect moment, you can sense her feeling it out, looking for it, that slight worry draws you in – and OMG did she find it last night.” So she did.
She seemed happy too, but to have much unfinished business. “Take care of each other out there,” Lenker said to close, “we have a lot of work to do in this world together. Let’s keep going.”
***
Setlists:
Thanks for reading. The headline this time comes from the lyrics of 'Leaving Her'. Previous tour diaries are here: 2020, 2022, 2023, 2024
