Big Thief: Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You (digital outlets)

The six singles released in advance of this fifth outing by New York's Big Thief hinted at the breadth on this 20-song double album which, at a push, you'd describe as Americana-cum-experimental folk.

The celestial and philosophical Spud Infinity was Band-like country music with fiddle and jaw-harp but the recent Simulation Swarm was slippery folk-rock.

Previous Big Thief albums have shifted between ennui-filled folk, bouncy pop and howling guitars as these four graduates of Boston's Berklee School of Music staked out broad territory to explore.

But the three openers here – Change,Time Escaping which sounds spontaneous from the opening throat-clearing by singer Adrianne Lenker and Spud Infinity– signal a subdued and downbeat folk now underpinning Lenker's lyrics which chime with these uncertain times but can also sound timeless.

Recorded in four different studios from upstate New York to California, Colorado and Arizona, these songs caught on the fly convey a human immediacy.

Lenker can channel a little Chrissie Hynde (the aggressive pop-rock grind of Little Things) or sound child-like (the refined visual images of the delicate Heavy Bend) alongside the prominent roots country songs: the casual roadhouse fiddle and homely Red Moon; the spare acoustic 12,000 Lines (“some nights barely breathing at all, waiting for my woman to call”); the languid folk-pop of Certainty and Wake Me Up to Drive. . .

Here too is pastoralism on the flute-coloured No Reason conjuring up Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters; the darker Sparrow opening with “wrapped in the wings of a sparrow, beak is as sharp as an arrow . . . threading my heart through the needle . . .”; the gritty and shambling pop-rock noise of Love Love Love and the electronica backdrop of Blurred View.

As with the Dylan/Band Basement Tapes and the Beatles' White Album, this diverse double of discrete songs is for long-haul listening and discovery.

But these grounded, poetically enigmatic lyrics come from a single source, Lenker looking at life through the prism of old and new Americana.