Big Thief offer a riddle in their latest single. ‘Not’ has an anaphoric structure, beginning with the lines ‘it’s not the energy reeling / nor the lines in your face’, and a similar negation continuing throughout. The lyrics play around with the ambiguous ‘it’, revolving around but never revealing what ‘it’ is – only what it isn’t.

‘Not’ is the first single from Big Thief’s forthcoming album Two Hands, billed as a sister album to U.F.O.F., their previous album from earlier this year. The title of that album was an acronym for ‘Unidentified Flying Object Friend’, reaching towards the celestial to embrace rather than alienate it. Two Hands by contrast has been described by the band as ‘the earth twin’, and ‘Not’ feels like a bridge between the two in both its imagery and musical style.

The first verse describes a horizon of images from ‘the clouds in space’ and ‘the bed in the earth’. Adrianne Lenker’s lyrics also play around with abstract and concrete descriptions, moving from ‘the formless being’ and ‘the cry in the air’, to ‘the boy I’m seeing with her long black hair.’ The juxtaposing gender descriptions are also employed here in the search for something not yet definable. Lenker can only describe what she’s yearning for through negation.

Instrumentally, Big Thief manage to pack a punch on this track. The atmosphere is not dissimilar to moments on U.F.O.F, stepping into a darker shade of rock than their lighter indie-folk. ‘Not’ is reminiscent of the dramatic coda in ‘Contact’, or the whoozy and heavy sounds on ‘Jenni’. Lenker’s voice is both fragile and coarse, quivering by the fourth verse as she hangs over the instrumental, and growling out the line ‘it’s not the hunger revealing’. The song gradually increases the temperature like on a pan of water, until the lid bursts off, cutting the last chorus short, and boiling over. The track leads out on this incendiary guitar solo, and at this point Big Thief enter a new state of being. ‘Not’ may not be a complete indication as to the musical theme of ‘Two Hands’, but it provides plenty to look forward to.

‘Not’ is available to stream now via 4AD