Adrianne Lenker dies within two minutes of her solo record abysskiss. It is not a dramatic passing. Over feather-light fingerpicking, she simply sings, “See my death become a trail/And the trail leads to a flower.” Her voice is sweet, the tone muted, nothing but her breath and guitar strings. The transformation sounds peaceful, maybe even a relief, a dispersing of stored energies.
Lenker recorded abysskiss quickly, in about a week, and the entire album has this exhaled quality. It doesn’t feel worked over, or rushed—it feels focused and unconcerned with your comprehension. The palette is muted and spare, exactly one electric guitar chugging away quietly on one song (“out of your mind.”) The rest of the album seems to be rustling toward some private horizon, a gleam in its eye. You don’t listen to it so much as follow it, the way you might track a wild animal that showed up in your yard. It is pastoral music, but not a barefoot-in-a-field way; more of a don’t-eat-these-berries sort of way, a world of mystery and menace whose secrets will always be held from us.
As the leader of Big Thief and on her own, Lenker writes powerfully about secrets of all kinds. The shared secrets of intimacy, the buried secrets of family, the impenetrable secrets of nature—they all swirl like sediment in a wine glass. abysskiss thrums quietly with the unease of these secrets, of mingled trauma and love. “Hold me in your heat” she whispers on “terminal paradise”—an animal plea, a child’s plea. On “out of your mind,” she sings, “My love pulls the trigger on you,” and on “10 miles” she kisses a lover “very hard and wild.” Her path is a prickly one, somewhere between savage and tender.
You don’t hear the savagery at first. It takes several listens before the delicate fingerpicking and the whisper of her voice turns dark. Her lyrics accrete alarming imagery in quick clumps, in the “little red flower on your wrist” on “blue and red horses,” or the “sharp glass loosing of your best friend” on “what can you say.” The characters in her songs always seem one wrong step away from leaking blood or spilling someone else’s. The more time you spend cocking an ear to her music, the more foreboding her world seems, the more likely it will end in pain.
This world is not that far removed from her work in Big Thief, but there is a solitary chill here that isn’t only or entirely because this is her solo work. Her songs for Big Thief bustle with characters, people with places and names and specific histories. She was a person rooted in and tethered to society, tweaking and exploring its bonds with her writing but still embedded within it. abysskiss is a taste of what Lenker’s imagination can do when it is set free down its own dreamy paths, away from these shared histories. There are almost no names here, just a world of beauty and terror, of worms dropped into beaks, horse tails flicking away flies. She is like Annie Dillard in her 1974 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a dreamy soul wandering alone in nature and marveling at the brutality and the grace she finds there.