Every great forest keeps a few secrets from daylight. Strange sounds beyond the tree line. Flickers of movement that disappear when you look directly at them. The feeling that the woods know something you don’t. Big Thief’s U.F.O.F. lives in that territory. It is an album fascinated by what lingers just outside comprehension, not as a puzzle to solve but as a place to linger.
By 2019, the Brooklyn quartet had already built a reputation on two emotionally intense records, Masterpiece and Capacity, albums rooted in remembrance, family history, and personal wounds. But rather than sharpen those stories into something bigger and louder, Adrianne Lenker and company headed west to a secluded studio in Washington’s forests to make an album that felt less written than discovered.
Much as R.E.M. responded to the relative clarity of Murmur and Reckoning by pivoting into the humid ambiguities of Fables of the Reconstruction, Big Thief followed two emotionally direct records with something more elusive. The songs became less concerned with telling stories than creating states of mind. The result was an album built from suggestion, silence, and sonic haze. It was a band deciding that less terrain might actually reveal more.
“I am the photograph in you”
The influences floating through U.F.O.F. feel less like reference points and more like spirits moving through the trees. You can hear traces of Joni Mitchell in the way melodies seem to bend toward intuition rather than structure, and echoes of Neil Young in the album’s willingness to let vulnerability remain unguarded. The hushed intimacy of Nick Drake dwells in the acoustic textures, while the conversational candor of Elliott Smith can be heard in the way Lenker delivers profound emotions almost as passing observations.
Meanwhile, the dreamlike disorientation of Radiohead at their most spectral hovers around the edges, and then there are stretches where the intricate ambiance evokes Grizzly Bear. Even the adventurous guitar treatments associated with St. Vincent seem to cast a faint shadow across the proceedings. There is also a quieter lineage here, closer to Wilco at their most destabilized, where folk songwriting begins to fracture under its own sonic curiosity without losing emotional clarity. Yet listing influences ultimately misses the point. Big Thief don’t wear these artists so much as compost them, letting those influences decay into something entirely their own.
But, influences alone cannot explain the album’s power. U.F.O.F. is one of those rare records whose beauty feels inseparable from its elusiveness. Lenker sings with a mixture of fragility and assurance that few vocalists can sustain, while the band favors space, understatement, and intuition over display. The production captures fingertips brushing strings, the grain of Lenker’s breath, the way a single guitar note seems to bloom and then disappear into the trees around it. The result is not merely atmospheric. The songs glow rather than shine.
The first four songs slowly teach the listener to notice the places where one thing becomes another. “Contact” arrives like a transmission from somewhere between sleep and waking life, its nervous pulse suggesting both danger and wonder. The title track, “U.F.O.F.,” follows with one of the record’s central ideas — the unknown is not necessarily threatening. Lenker sings about a visitor from elsewhere with tenderness rather than fear, turning the science-fiction image into something spiritual. “Cattails” drifts through fields and rivers with the ease of a half-remembered childhood afternoon, finding divinity in familiar environs. Then comes “From,” whose looping guitars and elusive lyrics feel like someone trying to describe an experience before language can pin it down. These songs do not move in straight lines. They circle, hover, and lift away.
The second half deepens the spell. “Orange” stands among Lenker’s most devastating performances, her voice carrying extraordinary emotional weight without ever raising itself above a near-whisper. “Terminal Paradise” transforms grief into something almost luminous, suggesting loss and beauty can occupy the same space. “Jenni” unfolds like a fable murmured beside a campfire, full of movement and anxiety without ever closing itself off. Finally, “Magic Dealer” closes the record in a mist of surrender and reckoning, as though the album has gradually wandered beyond the reach of ordinary language.
Throughout these songs, Big Thief seems fascinated by crossings. The distinctions we draw between self and world begin to soften. Memory becomes landscape. Inner lives become shared terrain. Nothing on U.F.O.F. stays inside the borders assigned to it. Every song seems intent on proving that the walls separating people, places, emotions, and even sounds are far thinner than we imagine.
Part of what makes U.F.O.F. so compelling is how completely it commits to this worldview. The album suggests that many of the boundaries we rely upon are more fragile than we imagine. Explanation gives way to presence. Relationships here feel older than language itself, bonds that seem thicker than a velvet ring and harder to define than any label we might place upon them. Lenker rarely explains what her images mean because explanation would defeat the purpose. These songs function more like invitations than arguments. They ask listeners to sit with uncertainty and discover significance in places they might otherwise overlook. A flicker in the woods. A distant voice. A passing animal. A vision that refuses to fade after breakfast.
The album artwork captures this sensibility perfectly. The cover’s soft, blurred imagery feels suspended between photograph and apparition. Nothing is entirely clear, yet everything feels connected, as though the image is less concerned with defining its subject than showing how one thing bleeds into another. Like the music itself, the artwork resists sharp outlines. It suggests movement, impermanence, and transformation rather than certainty. Looking at it feels a bit like staring into water at dusk, where reflections mingle with reality until distinguishing one from the other becomes impossible. The cover prepares listeners for exactly the journey awaiting inside: a realm that reveals itself slowly and on its own terms.
As for the ideal listening environment, U.F.O.F. practically provides its own instructions. Save it for evening. Better yet, save it for that blue-gray hour when daylight has mostly departed but darkness has not fully arrived. A quiet porch, a forest trail, a Lake Chatuge cabin window during rainfall, or a solitary drive along an empty two-lane road all feel appropriate. This is not an album for multitasking. It rewards stillness. The songs seem designed for moments when the world grows quiet enough that distant sounds begin to take on unexpected meaning. Somewhere between wakefulness and sleep is where this record truly lives. For Big Thief, the crossing is the destination.
The influence of U.F.O.F. has only grown with time. Its success helped accelerate a wave of indie folk that treated feeling and negative space as compositional tools rather than empty space. You can hear echoes of its approach in boygenius, whose members similarly balance confessional songwriting with arrangements that allow restraint and mood to carry emotional weight. The National’s later work embraced a comparable patience, recognizing that not every feeling requires a crescendo. Florist, Julia Jacklin, and Rosali followed Big Thief’s example by treating environment as an active participant in the song rather than merely its backdrop.
Across contemporary indie music, U.F.O.F. helped legitimize the idea that quiet can carry further than volume ever manages. Big Thief’s gift has always been making the cosmic feel personal and the personal feel cosmic, whether Lenker is singing to visitors from another sphere or offering to be your record player, baby, if you know what she means. More importantly, U.F.O.F. quietly expanded what indie folk believed a song could do. Melody no longer had to carry the emotional burden by itself. Timbre, patience, and absence became storytellers too.
What ultimately makes U.F.O.F. endure is its suspicion that separation itself may be an illusion. Across forty minutes, Big Thief dissolve the boundaries between waking and dreaming, grief and beauty, memory and place, the familiar and the unknowable. In an age obsessed with categories and fixed borders, that feels quietly radical. Sometimes the greatest mystery isn’t what lies beyond the tree line. It’s realizing we were part of the forest all along.
Megan’s favorite song on this album is “Cattails”. There is one bit of writing advice I received years ago that has always stuck with me: use three senses to make a scene come alive. Big Thief is in a league of their own when it comes to the use of this trick, and “Cattails” is a masterclass on why it works. You can see wrinkled hands, smell the thickness of June, hear the river babbling through the legs of your lawn chair. What makes it magical is that the otherworldly, alien ideas strung throughout the album can coexist with the simplistic, intimate beauty of a cattail swaying in the breeze.
Recorded with the kind of closeness that makes you feel like you are in the room with the band rather than listening to a finished record, there is no production added that isn’t essential, and none taken away. You can hear the slight echoes of the recording space, the breath between phrases, the tiny imperfections that most bands would have deleted. These moments are not flaws but an encouragement to be more human.
Lyrically, there is longing and grieving of a life that is still unfolding. Not many artists convey the superpower that is a standout voice that also remains subtle yet sharp. Lenker isn’t a powerhouse vocalist because she doesn’t need to be. The force lies in the softness and secrecy. She’s the kind of artist who may not say much because she’s busy writing it all down – but when she does speak, you’re going to want to listen.
Wendell’s favorite song on this album is “Jenni,” a track that quietly ignites. For most of its runtime, it unfolds like a slowcore séance, Lenker’s breathy voice drifting through a drone of hushed guitars and mounting unease. Nothing in it feels calm. The song circles rather than advances, returning to the same phrases as if testing how much pressure they can hold before they give way. There is a sense of something gathering just beneath the surface, not yet audible, only implied. Then the tension begins to harden. Each repetition narrows the space around it, the music tightening into a kind of suspended gasp, until even the gaps between notes feel charged.
The break does not arrive so much as give out. The song fractures into a visceral wall of distortion, feedback, and warped string bends that feels less like performance than controlled collapse. Buck Meek pushes the guitar into instability, where tone and noise begin to blur and the sound seems to arrive from somewhere just beyond intention.
Afterward, nothing quite settles back into place. The song feels suspended in its own aftershock, as though it is still occurring in a slightly different register of the room. On U.F.O.F., even collapse does not end cleanly. It lingers, half-audible, like something continuing just beyond the edge of hearing.
Big Thief’s work can be found here, while their music is available on all streaming platforms and places where records are sold. You will hear their songs on SiriusXM stations SiriusXMU, The Coffee House, and The Loft. They have been on NPR Tiny desk twice, once in 2016 in studio and another home show in 2022.
Additionally, Lenker appeared solo in 2020 during the pandemic-phase home concert series, fittingly performing from a Joshua Tree camper trailer. The band last played The Fox Theater in October, and Buck Meek brought a solo set to The Earl just last month. When Big Thief or Adrianne Lenker come back to the ATL, go. Some artists invite admiration. Big Thief invites witness.
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