Bright Future solidifies Adrianne Lenker’s status as an all-time great singer-songwriter.
Adrianne Lenker feels like one of the last true folk legends. Born into a cult, a runaway at sixteen, married and then divorced to her Big Thief bandmate Buck Meek—for all of her soft-spoken hesitance, she’s lived the life of a rockstar. She’s spoken about not having a real home for years at a time, constantly moving. She’s a vagabond, at least as much as one can be at her level of notoriety. Like her last few projects, her new album, Bright Future, was recorded in a short amount of time, in a cabin, deep in the wilderness. It feels like settling down, a homecoming—not necessarily to a place, but to herself.
Lenker’s previous solo album, songs, was recorded in the midst of the pandemic. It wears this fact on its sleeve: its analog recording forces the listener to feel Lenker sitting alone, playing these songs into a recorder. Bright Future was recorded in similar analog fashion, but it feels much fuller. Lenker is backed by Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson (a.k.a. Twain), and Josefin Rusteen. Their voices join hers, lifting her up.
This record feels much more communal, not just in sound but in subject matter. In “Fool,” Lenker traces a web of people in her life, reflecting on where each person has wound up. Lenker’s laughs and breaths are preserved in the recording, making the song feel warm and present. As Big Thief’s album Two Hands acts as the self-proclaimed “earthly twin” to its predecessor, U.F.O.F., Bright Future feels like the grounded other side of songs’ spacey coin. Here, Lenker’s voice is fuller, closer. Her lyrics deal more with the concrete. “When I was seven I saw the first film that made me scared.” She reconstructs memory in a way that feels tactile, immediate. These songs are powerful in their sparseness, particularly opener “Real House.” Here, Lenker sings slowly over a trailing, solitary piano. It’s blisteringly confrontational, hard to face straight-on. Lenker is unshielded as she’s ever been, letting her voice ring solitarily as she sings a series of lyrics that refuse to rhyme. The song is gutting—a plea from Lenker to her mother for understanding, a desperate recounting of Lenker’s loss of innocence. “I wanted so much for magic to be real.”
“Free Treasure” is one of the finest songs on the album, if not of Lenker’s catalog. Like many of her best songs, it is sweet and a little sad, cozy and a little mournful. Here Lenker delivers one of her best lines: “Just when I thought I couldn’t feel more, I feel a little more.”
Lenker’s songs exist as moving texts rather than recordings. She changes lyrics in between performances, plays in-progress songs to audiences of thousands. She blurs which songs are solely hers and which fit under the Big Thief name, trading them back-and-forth and reworking them. On Bright Future, she reimagines the band’s 2023 single “Vampire Empire,” making it looser, twangier. Where the initial recording of the song felt like an exorcism, here it feels like a folk standard.
The timeless feeling of Lenker’s songwriting is present here more than ever. These songs are simultaneously striking and familiar, songs that would fit just as well played by a campfire as they would put on a mixtape. She sings about the world ending, about dying, about being born. One of her greatest strengths as a songwriter is her ability to tap into the metaphysical. Even here, in her more grounded mode, she manages to capture something elemental. Big Thief bassist Max Oleartchik described her process as “this instrument of witchcraft. It’s always holy. She writes music from this place that’s very intuitive and fearless, and she has confidence that there’s some kind of spirit or force that she can listen to.” Lenker has the rare ability to make music that is both spiritual and approachable, dealing with subject matter without pretense or cliché.
2024 marks ten years since Adrianne Lenker’s debut solo album, Hours Were the Birds. In the last decade, she’s released ten albums—five solo and five with Big Thief—and three EPs as a principal songwriter. They are all immaculate. Lenker manages to take musical stylings that feel traditional and familiar and make something new and totally her own, and then reinvent this over and over. Her music is beautiful and moving, honest and unique. On Bright Future, she showcases the strength of her songwriting by presenting it distilled.
Grade: A+