Big Thief have been teasing a new triple album called Horsepower. Release details have yet to be revealed, but the band debuted the follow-up to 2025’s Double Infinity in its entirety live Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on August 22. Here’s everything we know so far.
What happened at the Nashville show?
Fans were prepared for a standard Big Thief show at Ryman Auditorium when Adrianne Lenker introduced the record, joking: “If you had some hopes of hearing some of the songs you might know, those can also be discarded.” Though they didn’t perform Horsepower in sequence, they did play the full album. Featured on the album are Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Iris DeMent, all three of whom joined Big Thief on stage, along with Russ Pahl and Greg Leisz on pedal steel and guitar, and Hannah Read, Richard Bowden, and Zosha Warpeha on fiddle. Photo and video was not permitted at the show, but multiple cameras were documenting the entire night for a concert film to be released at a later date.
Had they debuted any of the songs before?
Yes. Two of the songs, ‘Carry’ and ‘Space and Time’, were first heard bac in in May during a session in an Irish field for Belgium’s Radio 1. In fact, almost two-thirds of the the record had been performed onstage before: tracks including ‘Happiness’, ‘Baby Honey Sweet Darlin’, ‘Spatchcock Chickenshit Bingo’, and ‘Muscle Memory’, as well as two songs I got to hear (and wrote about) at this year’s Primavera Sound, ‘Beautiful World’ and ‘Happinness’. And ‘Sadness as a Gift’ was previously recorded for Lenker’s solo album, Bright Future.
How many songs are on the album?
There are 29 songs on Horsepower, whose tracklist has yet to be revealed.
What do we know about the making of the album?
During the show, Lenker mentioned that Horsepower was made in Nashville last May, though it’s unclear if it was recorded at Woodland Studios, which is owned by Welch and David Rawlings. One song, known originally as ‘Bloom’ and now ’21’, was the first song, Lenker said, that she and Meek wrote together.
This story will be updated…
