“Bright Future” – Adrianne Lenker

Album: Bright Future

Artist: Adrianne Lenker

Year: 2024

Genre: Folk

Grade: A

“Real House,” a spare six-minute meditation on formative memories both wistful and painful, opens Adrianne Lenker’s 2024 album Bright Future with sublime profundity. The sound is rustic — her starry voice warbling over a quiet piano chord progression, with a lo-fi recording quality that amplifies the musical imperfections. We can hear when the singer moves away from the microphone, feel the creaking wood of the sustain pedals being pressed down, the gentle chuckle that begins the recording. The homemade effect brings a special authenticity to the lyrics, which are among the most moving that Lenker has ever penned (and she’s been penning profoundly moving lyrics ever since her career began in 2015), equating the changes that come with moving to a new childhood home with the sadness that is shared on the day the family dog dies. It’s an impressive rumination on life, something that Lenker can convey better than any current songwriter.

In fact, Bright Future positions Lenker as one of the most impressive songwriters in modern musical history. She’s only getting better as time goes on, and her prolificacy is a gift that needs to be cherished and protected at all costs. Whether as a solo artist or as a member of Big Thief, Lenker is becoming a modern-day songwriter/philosopher on the same level as Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan. Her words cut to the bone of human emotion, and she’s able to communicate highly personal messages in a way that is relatable to anyone who listens.

Of course, the poetic lyrics would mean far less if they weren’t accompanied by such expressive music, with intricate melodies that twist and turn and become entangled in increasingly subtle ways. Like all of Lenker’s music, “Real House” sounds like it could fall apart at any second, so slender and delicate is its structure, yet it holds true and creates something stronger than any of its individual parts.

The rest of Bright Future is filled with similar magic across its 12 songs and 43 minutes. The best and most immediate songs (e.g. “Real House,” “Sadness as a Gift” and “Fool”) are all placed at the beginning, which enhances the album’s directness even as the quality slightly stills toward the end. However, every song is well-crafted and filled with individual aural pleasures — the long and winding melody of “Evol,” the sweet double-tracked falsetto chorus of “No Machine,” the scratchy fiddles of “Vampire Empire.”

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The main takeaways is that Lenker’s solo material is entirely separate from Big Thief, able to exist in any setting. She’s not reliant on a band, and Bright Future is not Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You Part Two. (The fantastic 2020 one-two punch of Songs and Instrumentals should have dispelled any contrary notions anyway.)

For one, there are no drums, few electric guitars and nothing resembling rock music — this is a folk album through and through. And even though the album carries over the Americana influences of “Red Moon” and “Dried Roses,” the tender countrified ballads on Bright Future are unique unto themselves. There’s hardly anything resembling the “indie” sound of her main band. Instead, Lenker’s after a style that is far older and less defined. (The concluding “Ruined,” which features electronic reverb in the vein of “Magic Dealer” or “Cut My Hair” or Phoebe Bridgers’ “I Know the End,” is the lone exception.)

Perhaps the album’s most important inclusion is “Vampire Empire,” which astute Big Thief fans will recognize as a standout non-album single from 2023, itself vastly different from the live version performed on the Dragon tour in 2022. The version featured on Bright Future is once again altered into a completely new song; raw and stripped-back and somewhat abrasive. It only goes to show that no two songs are the same, and that Lenker — in the grand and ancient tradition of folk music — is not afraid to continuously tinker with a song to unlock all its endless permutations. (It’s also worth noting that many of these tracks were recorded in one take and issued as-is, suggesting that the same songs could be totally different on any given day.)

What Bright Future accomplishes, or rather confirms, is that Lenker is a songwriter so singular and talented that everything she touches turns to gold. She’s the ultimate musical rarity: a great artist who fully understands that her calling is to create great art, and one who never grows tired of doing so.

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