Pre-Order. Released 15th March, via 4AD
Adrianne Lenker announces her new solo album, ‘Bright Future’, her first album since 2020’s songs and instrumentals, featuring co-production from Philip Weinrobe alongside contributions from Nick Hakim, Mat Davidson and Josefin Runsteen.
Following previous single, ‘Ruined’, ‘Sadness As A Gift’ sees Lenker at her most familiar and warm - a track that is both utterly timeless, yet new and surprising on every listen. The aliveness of Adrianne’s voice keeps her poetry aloft. She sings in a circle completed by guitar, piano, violin and all voices. “The seasons go so fast / Thinking that this one was going to last / Maybe the question was too much to ask.”
On ‘Bright Future’, Adrianne Lenker, a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme, says it plainly: “You have my heart / I want it back.” Documented with analogue precision, what began as an experiment in collaboration became proof Adrianne’s heart did return, full to the brim, daring her into the unknown.
During the high vibrance of Autumn 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Everyone could come. Three musical friends - “Some of my favourite people” - had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at forest- hidden analogue studio, Double Infinity. The musicians - Hakim, Davidson and Runsteen - were known to Adrianne but newer to each other. “I had no idea what the outcome would be,” she recalls. The result? “It was magical,” she says. Adrianne’s musical risk became ‘Bright Future’, the studio’s first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
‘Bright Future’’s co-producer and engineer, Philip Weinrobe, prepared the studio. He has been Adrianne’s partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not intend to make an album. They would instead explore the songs with no expectations. Even with an open outcome, from the start, Phil wanted to capture the sessions with the purest, technical honesty.
Admirers of Adrianne’s solo music and of Big Thief will find on ‘Bright Future’ her reliable talent captured in stunning, magnetic clarity. In the company of parlour instruments, Adrianne’s modern melodic and lyrical inventions create new traditions. Her vocal flights at times outwit gravity and then land, guiding along an earthly path. The wholeness of the un-spliced recordings preserves a time of musical friendship during a golden season. The album also features the original recording of the now-beloved Big Thief song, ‘Vampire Empire’.
Available to independent retailers on recycled vinyl