Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
By Kate Trebra | Top Tracks: “Free Treasure,” “Candleflame,” and “Already Lost”
Adrianne Lenker – Bright Future
Adrianne Lenker’s music feels like poetry. Recording entire albums on an eight-track tape, Lenker’s sincerity shines through both her sound and her process. Her previous album, songs and instrumentals (2020), was created in isolation, removed from the intimacy of daily life. Four years later, Lenker takes a step forward in Bright Future and lives in the dip between the earth and human connection, relishing in its closeness.
The album opens with “Real House,” where Lenker reflects on the vulnerability of seeing her mother cry for the first time. She recalls childhood memories over scattered piano chords, her voice seeming to reach for each memory as it comes. Now thirty-one, she grapples with the need for her mother’s love, the one constant in her life. Reflections are numerous in Bright Future, a skill that only comes with taking life as it comes.
In “Fool,” Lenker shifts from personal memories to an outward view, documenting the lives of people around her. Her breezy documentation of what those around her are up to feels like a catch-up with an old friend. Jamie moved to Los Angeles, John is on a farm, and Zoe built a house. Though these people are strangers to the listener, Lenker’s tone radiates hope for the fullness of life ahead. Her voice, gentle and light, floats through the album’s lo-fi production. Tracks like “Sadness as a Gift” and “No Machine” nod to her earlier, guitar-led work on abysskiss and Hours Were the Birds, though a bit older and wiser.
In “Free Treasure,” the habitual moments that most overlook become well-documented in Lenker’s world. From dinner made at half past ten to shoes muddied from tripping over dirt in the backyard, there is beauty and love in the mundane for all to see. Optimism pours through the bright guitar and domestic lyrics, savoring the intimacy of small things like sitting on the kitchen floor together.
The introspection deepens in “Candleflame,” where she looks at a relationship as a whole; “I feel God here and there / People tell me it’s everywhere,” she sings, her voice crackling through the warm fuzz that has become her signature. In “Donut Seam” (a play on “don’t it seem”), a deteriorating relationship is juxtaposed against a dying world. Despite its seemingly dark subject matter, Lenker sings with a lightness that shows the importance of treasuring the world as it is, not as it will be.
The beauty of Lenker’s music is that a song can exist in two different versions of itself. “Ruined,” previously sung as a band-filled shout to an ex-lover becomes a quiet plea to a renewal on Bright Future (“I wish I’d waved when I saw you / I just watched you passing by”). “Vampire Empire” turns from resentful and furious into a playful dance filled with plucked banjo and running fiddles.
Bright Future is Lenker’s most introspective and raw album yet, a testament to lived experience and a shifting perspective. Created and crafted by Lenker and friends Mat Davidson, Nick Hakim, and Josefin Runsteen, it is a stunning reflection on the relationships that both ground us and push us forward.
