AlternativeFolk & World
Big Thief have opened the Big Thief Live Archive, a free website holding ten full concert recordings, and will add a new one on the second Tuesday of every month. Listeners can pick takes from any of the ten and build their own playlists.
The oldest of the ten is from 11 November 2019 at The Athenaeum in Columbus, Ohio, and the most recent are three consecutive nights at London’s Brixton Academy on 23, 24 and 25 April this year. In between there are the Columbiahalle in Berlin, the Opera House at 7A Ranch in Wimberley, Texas, Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, a night in Queens, one in Los Angeles and the Hammersmith Apollo in 2023. They were mixed by 4AD’s in-house engineer Fabian Prynn, and the band credits the recordings to their front-of-house engineer Alice Wilder and monitor engineer Aleda Deroche.
“Every show we play holds a different energy,” the band said in a statement. “The songs are always changing and sound different every night, and we spend so much more time on the road than in studios, and so we felt a desire to create something that captures the ever-undulating aliveness of our music through time.” The idea came out of drummer James Krivchenia’s love of Grateful Dead live releases.
Alongside the archive, the band have put “Incomprehensible”, recorded at the 3Arena in Dublin on 29 April this year, on streaming services: that show is not one of the ten in the archive. Their last studio album, “Double Infinity”, came out on 5 September 2025 through 4AD.
Text by Marçal Bonastre