After two and a half years since her last album, “Songs and Instrumentals,” Adrianne Lenker released her fifth solo album titled “Bright Future.” This album employs soft and emotional instruments with often sad but relatable lyricism. Much like her past albums, Lenker’s new album fits into indie and folk music genres.
Leading up to the full album’s release on March 22, 2024, Lenker had released four songs from the album. Beginning on December 5 she released the last track “Ruined” and ending on March 18 with the fifth track “Free Treasure.”
Almost every song in “Bright Future” retains Lenker’s recurring style of soft acoustics with a gentle voice that blend perfectly together. One song that stands out from this trend is “Vampire Empire” which features faster paced guitar instrumentals and a harsher vocal tone.
“Vampire Empire” is Lenker’s personal rendition of a song with the same title previously released in October of 2023 by her band Big Thief. For the most part the lyrics are exactly the same apart from one line. In Lenker’s solo version she sings, “In her vampire empire, I’m the fish and she’s my gills.” In the original by Big Thief, Lenker sings, “In her vampire empire, I am” while dragging out the last note leading to the chorus verse. The newly released solo version is stronger because the absent moment where she does not sing the second line in the original seems to have something missing. In her own version however, when she adds the second line, it fits perfectly and allows the song to roll into the chorus much more smoothly.
While most songs on “Bright Future” are constructed primarily by acoustic guitar instrumentals, in the song “Evol” the piano can be heard as Lenker sings a complicated set of lyrics. In “Evol” Lenker uses wordplay referencing that “love” said backwards sounds like “evil”, a word with a completely opposite meaning. She also flips “dream” to spell “maerd” which sounds like “marred”, hence the next line being “I’m marred in your mind.” Lenker continues this theme throughout the song, which is probably her best lyrically constructed song on the new album.
For years Lenker has been making music so gentle and heartfelt that if you’re to give it a deep listen it will likely jerk a tear or two. While some would shy away from sad music that might make you cry, others may find comfort in tender music with relatable lyrics to know they aren’t alone in whatever they may be going through. The first and final tracks in “Bright Future” are soft, piano-heavy songs which are sure to touch anyone’s heart.
The first track, “Real House,” is a 6 minute song that begins with Lenker playing very soft piano chords for a minute until she introduces her voice and lyrics. On one line she sings, “I wanted so much for magic to be real” while dragging out the “so” it sounds like she moved away from the microphone and her voice gets quiet as a whisper. Then at the end of that lyric she comes back to her normal volume. Throughout “Real House” Lenker sings about her life growing up and her dreams to be an inventor as a seven-year-old girl. Then again sings about an experience in the hospital when she was 14 and how her mother comforted her.
The last track, “Ruined,” originally released on December 5, 2023, is four and a half minutes of similar sounding quiet piano instrumentals throughout the song which get a little louder as Lenker sings the chorus. She repeats the chorus lines, “So much coming through, every hour too/can’t get enough of you/you come around, I’m ruined” 8 times throughout the song with shaky vocals like she is holding back tears. Lenker has often been very vulnerable in her music but “Ruined” is a step up toward being even more open about sharing experience with heartbreak.
“Bright Future” by Arianne Lenker is an amazing album featuring very sentimental and intimate music that is difficult to describe in words. Feelings that cannot be said through words can be better expressed through music. Lenker’s music often sparks melancholic and bittersweet feelings among its audience as she explores love and heartbreak, nostalgic feelings as she grows up, and her overall experiences in life.
