Worm

"Worm" moves through its runtime with the unhurried patience of its subject — something underground, something patient, something indifferent to human time. The guitar figures here are spare and recurring, almost hypnotic, circling back on themselves like thought that will not resolve. The band plays with deliberate economy, allowing silence and near-silence equal standing with sound. Lenker sings in a register that is closer to speaking than to traditional melody, letting the words do most of the emotional labor, and the words are occupied with decomposition and soil and the body returning to something older than itself. This is not morbid in the gothic sense — there is no drama attached to mortality here, only a kind of patient curiosity, an acceptance that sits somewhere between Buddhist and agrarian. The song belongs to a tradition of American folk that takes seriously the relationship between human beings and the earth they will eventually join, and Big Thief approaches that tradition without irony or nostalgia. Listening to it feels like slowing down your breath, like stepping out of an overheated room into cold air. It is music for the kind of person who does not flinch from difficult questions about what we are and where we go, and who finds more comfort in honest uncertainty than in reassuring answers. Best encountered alone, outdoors, or near a window facing something green.