THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Adrianne Lenker’s new solo release Bright Future is 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.
During the high vibrance of autumn 2022, the Big Thief band member got lucky. Her three musical friends — “some of my favourite people,” she says — had space in their busy touring schedules to join her at the forest-hidden analogue studio Double Infinity. The musicians were known to Lenker 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 the studio’s first album, a 12-track telling of a journeyed heart.
Co-producer and engineer Weinrobe prepared the studio. He has been her partner on previous solo albums, but this was something new. Adrianne did not go in intending to make an album, but only to 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.
On Bright Future, Admirers of Adrianne and Big Thief will find 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 unspliced recordings preserves a time of musical friendship during a golden season.
The album features the original recording of the now-beloved Big Thief song Vampire Empire. Meanwhile, the single Sadness As A Gift sees Lenker at her most familiar and warm on 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 the title track, Lenker — a songwriter known for turns of phrase and currents of rhyme — says it more 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.”
