How Big Thief broke the mould

Hundreds of women are applauding an incandescent guitar solo, filling the venue with shrieks, whistles and hollers. The soloist is Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, a musician who performs dissonant squalls with exhilarating regularity. In the grand arc of rock music, this is not an everyday occurrence.

Since electrification and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, untold numbers of women have produced ringing notes through an amplifier, though few have been celebrated for it. But American bands big enough to fill four sold-out nights in London at the O2 Academy Brixton are not often built around the exuberant guitar playing of a woman. (There’s Boygenius, who have broken the mould with their three-headed feminist indie-rock supergroup, and Annie Clark, though St Vincent is not a band in the same sense.)

Big Thief are a wonderfully anomalous act in many ways. They’ll play four nights in Brixton, for example, rather than one night at the O2 Arena (similar maths, very different vibes). They’ll fill a set with six unreleased songs when they have a lauded 2025 album, Double Infinity, to play. Big Thief are prolific, with Lenker and her counterpart Buck Meek also regularly releasing solo albums; drummer James Krivchenia is busy outside the band too.

Ultimately, they stand out in the current musical landscape as a snaggle-toothed, searching US guitar band who place Lenker’s musicality front and centre. On the final night of their residency, her blistering guitar work comes early, on an unreleased track called Christmas Day. Soon we’re on to the well-established flurries of Not, from the band’s album Two Hands, which demonstrated back in 2019 what makes Big Thief special. In her lyrics, Lenker defines something ineffable and urgent through a series of negatives: “It’s not the warm illusion / Nor the crack in the plate,” she sings. “Nor the breath of confusion / Nor the starkness of slate.” With her fingers, across several minutes, she tells of longing, frustration and transcendence.

One blink-and-you’ll-miss-it line recalls “the boy that I’m seeing / With her long black hair.” Lenker was raised in religious environments as a child and, over the lifetime of the band, has gradually identified as queer. Her songs question gender; in interviews, she has expressed scepticism that binaries and fixed labels actually mean a great deal. “I feel it’s strange to have [to] call yourself something,” she said in 2018. “What if I’m just simply a pulsating, glowing, amorphic organism that is just, like, existing and fluttering through a moment of eternity?”

Over on the other side of the stage, Meek is just as skilled a player, though he occupies a different tonal realm. He delivers pointillist notes on the folkier Simulation Swarm and dreamy washes elsewhere. On Change – a moving track about how nothing stands still – from Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You (2022), Meek’s brief solo is less a series of notes than a slew of arpeggiating vibrations. The band are a collaborative, yet Big Thief seem to understand that Lenker is not only a great songwriter, but a star, the heir to a lyrical, American electric guitar style.

There are touchingly old-school references: Neil Young remains the lodestone. And yet this band of thirtysomethings are growing in stature, their fanbase reaching past their fellow millennials down into gen Z and further up the age bracket into classic rock fandom. 

It is no accident that Change is both delicate and powerful in turn. It considers departures and the new partners of old lovers, sunrises and surprises. The band have undergone numerous permutations themselves. Double Infinity was a rebirth of sorts, spurred on by the departure in 2024 of their longtime bassist, Max Oleartchik, and filled with session players. Joshua Crumbly is now doing very good work in the bass role; longstanding drummer Krivchenia remains on the stool. And the original Big Thief lineup survived the amicable divorce between the previously married Meek and Lenker in 2018.

Now they are changing again, with the left-field US musician Laraaji joining in towards the end tonight, adding keyboards, zithers and vocalisations. The new songs point in all sorts of different directions.

Pterodactyl leans grungey; Casual Touch is a mellow country-rock banger; and Mr Man is redolent of 1970s New York, with Meek’s mosquito whine guitar underscoring Lenker’s sneered Patti Smith-like delivery. Its swagger suggests Big Thief could be the missing generational link between Wilco and Geese. This restless band clearly have another album ready to go – and a fanbase ready to follow, wherever they lead.

Photograph by Andy Hall for The Observer