Can’t get enough of you
Adrianne Lenker - 'Ruined' (Bright Future - 2024)
Adrianne Lenker has evolved as a songwriter since Big Thief in 2016 into one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary indie folk. Across five albums with the band and several solo projects, Lenker has, with either hat1, explored themes of love, loss, and the fleeting nature of human connection. While Big Thief tends to operate more as a collaborative, experimental ensemble, her solo work offers us a more intimate lens, both musically and lyrically. Bright Future, her latest solo record, takes this path where, while hopefully not a culmination of the journey, you can feel confident that this material is clearly hers and not of the band. It is a profoundly personal collection of songs full of emotional clarity set to a sense of hazy memories and feelings.
The album’s closing track, ‘Ruined’, while released in late 2023 as a lead-off to the new record, still sits at the end of the record to cap proceedings and is a song with quiet restraint and resonance, distilling Lenker’s ability to balance vocal and lyrical vulnerability and abstraction into its rawest form. Performed with just a piano and an instrument intriguingly credited as “crystal” in the credits, the song is hauntingly simple. Yet within its minimalism lies an emotional weight that lingers long after the final notes fade, and I’ve been carrying it around in my head all year.
This was even rammed home when, whilst waiting for a play of Laura Marling’s new album at a listening party, Bright Future was playing while we shuffled into the venue.
‘Ruined’ begins with Lenker’s plaintive, fragile, tiny bird voice, delicate and unguarded, accompanied by spare piano chords that pulse gently beneath her words. The song’s production is as stark and intimate as the rest of Bright Future, recorded live to tape in sessions prioritising immediacy over studio polish and course correction. This approach gives ‘Ruined’ a sense of rawness, as though we are listening to Lenker process her emotions in real-time and are intruding on something we shouldn’t be.
The lyrics centre on a refrain that repeats like a mantra: “Can’t get enough of you / You come around, I’m ruined.” The repetition, combined with Lenker’s deliberate phrasing—placing the stress on the second syllable of “ru-inned”—imbues the words with a visceral intensity, the hardness of that “d”. It’s a line that captures the twinning of that inescapable pull of desire and the devastation it can leave in its wake. The use of the word “ruined” implies a before-and-after transformation that cannot be undone. Something can be broken or damaged and then fixed or repaired; there’s no going back once ruined. Despite this finality, in Lenker’s delivery, there is a hint of acceptance, even reverence, for the way love can simultaneously wreck and elevate us.
One of Lenker’s greatest strengths as a songwriter is her ability to blend vivid imagery with lyrical abstraction. In ‘Ruined’, she sketches out the outline of a story—a gifted amethyst, a fern bending toward the light, water soaking a pillow—but leaves much unsaid - as if they never need to be uttered, the recipient knows. These fragments invite listeners to fill in the gaps, making the song feel deeply personal and universally relatable. The ambiguity mirrors how memory works for many of us, focusing on isolated details while the larger narrative remains just out of reach.
This lyrical approach has become a hallmark of Lenker’s work as a solo artist and with Big Thief. It makes her songs feel emotionally expansive, suggesting depths that can’t be fully articulated. In ‘Ruined’, the abstraction heightens the song’s emotional impact, creating a sense of longing that feels both specific and infinite.
If Bright Future represents the current peak of Lenker’s artistry, ‘Ruined’ is its emotional anchor. The song encapsulates the themes that have defined her career: love’s capacity to heal and harm, the fragility of connection, and the beauty in embracing impermanence.
As a path not travelled, here is a Big Thief live band version from 2023
In either version, you get pulled in by the increasing intensity of each of the title phrasings. ‘Ruined’ captures Lenker unguarded, both lyrically and musically. It is a song that finds beauty in the wreckage, offering a moment of stillness amid emotional chaos.
Not a literal hat like the cowboy one her head.