Welcome to The New York Times, PopCast. You're, if I could write 12,000 lines of music

news and criticism I am your host, John Caramonica.

No, that's not static playing in the background, that's not a radio, often the distance.

That is Spud, Infinity, and that is off the new Big Thief album, which is called Dragon

New Warm Mountain. I believe in you. Okay, so if you follow PopCast, you know, we might have

mentioned in the past, Big Thief is a band that I personally find challenging, my colleagues

also find challenging, and you know, we have largely just kind of like let the Big Thief

phenomenon unfold and try to observe it from a distance and kind of scratch heads every now and

again. But I'll be honest, as a critic, it is unsatisfying to effectively recuse yourself

from the critical discourse about a record or an artist. And so lately, especially around the

release of this album a few weeks ago, I've been thinking like, okay, what should I do?

And feel the need to like review the record straight ahead. I thought about maybe engaging

in writing about what it's like to really, really not be able to parse something that a lot of

people that you like and respect seem very excited about. And then I realized like I can have it

both ways, right? Like we can do an episode of PopCast, we can bring on people who care quite a

bit, and much like we did with the Taim and Paula episode a few years ago, not like the Taim

Paula was maybe a little bit more tense where I was like convinced me this band's not bad.

That's not exactly what I want to do here, but I feel like I want to have a conversation

about what it is about this band that is appealing to those who are fascinated by it,

and also potentially cause revulsion in me. And in order to do that, I wanted to bring

folks on who have written seriously about Big Fif. So we're going to have two guests,

John Dolan from Rolling Stone is here, Sam Sadomsky from pitchfork is here,

...