Big Thief launch free Live Archive with 10 mixed concerts

Big Thief have launched the Big Thief Live Archive, a free site where fans can hear "fully mixed concerts from the recent and distant past", according to a press release cited by Pitchfork. The archive currently holds 10 sets, and a new performance will be added on the second Tuesday of every month.

To coincide with the launch, the band have also released a live version of "Incomprehensible", taken from a performance in Dublin in April. Pitchfork's report includes the recording alongside its story.

The announcement comes just after Big Thief gave the live debut of a forthcoming triple album, as Pitchfork describes it. The report as quoted here gives no further detail on that record.

Inspired by the Grateful Dead

Pitchfork reports that the archive was inspired by drummer James Krivchenia's love of the Grateful Dead's extensive catalogue of live albums. Big Thief's version begins far smaller, at 10 sets, but it follows a similar basic idea: concert recordings presented as releases in their own right rather than as extras to studio albums.

The source does not say which shows or dates are included in the archive, who mixed them, or how long the monthly schedule is intended to run. EILISH has not heard the archive's contents and cannot comment on the recordings themselves.

Songs that change nightly

The band explained their thinking in a statement quoted by Pitchfork. "Every show we play holds a different energy," they wrote. "The songs are always changing and sound different every night, and we spend so much more time on the road than in studios, and so we felt a desire to create something that captures the ever-undulating aliveness of our music through time."

That reasoning gives the project its purpose. If a song is rearranged or reinterpreted from one night to the next, a single studio recording can only represent one version of it. A growing run of complete, mixed concerts gives listeners a way to hear how the material develops across different performances, and the monthly release pattern means the archive will keep growing rather than arriving in one go.

The Dublin recording of "Incomprehensible" is the first example the band have released alongside the launch. Dublin is a short journey from Britain, but the source does not detail how the archive can be accessed beyond describing it as free.

The story was published by Pitchfork on 14 October 2026.