Big Time
| Angel Olsen
Big Time
Big Time is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, and her first original release since All Mirrors (2019). The album was released through Jagjaguwar on June 3, 2022. Produced by Olsen and Jonathan Wilson, the album was preceded by the singles "All the Good Times", "Big Time" and "Through the Fires". The record was accompanied by a 28-minute visual counterpart, directed by Kimberly Stuckwisch. -Wikipedia
Critic Reviews
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The Guardian
A tumultuous couple of years are elegantly worked out on the singer-songwriter’s sixth studio album.
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Pitchfork
Angel Olsen taps deeper into her country influences on a warm, self-assured album whose fluid narration unites love and grief, past and present.
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Rolling Stone
Six albums in, the indie rock darling makes a joyful, triumphant breakthrough.
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Paste Magazine
The singer's highly anticipated follow-up to All Mirrors delivers devastating, urgent triumphs of self-acceptance.
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AV Club
Each song within Big Time offers its own odyssey, imparting new lessons along the way. Life has given Olsen hell the last few years, but even with that comes the new joys of fresh love (exemplified in “Big Time” and “Chasing The Sun”) and a newfound wisdom. Big Time is a monumental work on loss and how quickly things can change. We see Olsen come into a new power as a songwriter, resulting in an album filled to the brim with radiance and conviction.
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PopMatters
With Big Time, Angel Olsen draws inspiration from some of popular music’s most perennial templates, revamping them and reinventing herself.
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NME
Angel Olsen's sixth album turns a period of intense emotion into an assured, Americana-flecked triumph.
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Loud and Quiet
It’s sweet and direct, its arrangements rich with organ, muted percussion and pedal-steel guitar. Sonically, as well as emotionally, Big Time feels almost like coming full circle, the unmistakable, burning infatuation of Olsen’s lyrics and delivery redirected by the joy of fulfilled love. The title track, co-written with Olsen’s partner, embodies that feeling best; the easy morning spent with her love becomes a reflection of the journey: “Guess I had to be losing to get here on time… And I’m loving you big time”.
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AllMusic
Big Time wrangles complex, overwhelming emotions with a broad palette that's commanded by its lyrics and tormented vocal performances.
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The Skinny
The sixth album from US songwriter Angel Olsen is a glorious symphony in love, loss and alt-country.
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Consequence
It’s hard to claim that Olsen has released her most personal record yet, as the artist has never obscured herself or her feelings in her music. Yet, Big Time might be the most direct view into Olsen — at least in the context of a full band. It’s a masterful, emotional body of work ready to fit any mood, and it’s yet another successful sea change for one of indie music’s most consistent artists.
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Autostraddle
Big Time is a gorgeous record. Olsen is a singular talent with an uncanny ability to make it so easy to join her on a journey that is rife with the pitfalls of heartache. Her voice is lilting and tender, at times she almost sounds like a siren, luring you toward her and uncertainty. The record matches the beauty of her voice with lush instrumentation that dips in and out of the twang of the country records my mom used to listen to when music was the dominant presence in my parents’ house. At times, it’s sparse and wistful, a piano or an organ and a guitar, always with Olsen’s voice living and breathing at the center.
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Stereogum
Big Time is a reflective, patient album, primarily abandoning the intense swings between quiet and loud that gave All Mirrors its impact. Yet every time you think it’s going to settle and drift away, it hits you with some new stunning musical turn, some crushing lyric. A lot of what Olsen is wrangling with on Big Time doesn’t necessarily seem like it ever gets answered once and for all. But across the album, she takes that big time and depicts it in small fragments — no less thunderous, but rendered at a scale where you can look at it, turn it over, and learn to move through it.
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The Line of Best Fit
Big Time is a remarkable and intimate display of growth from Angel Olsen.
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Clash Magazine
After ten years since her first studio album, 'Half Way Home', Angel Olsen proves that she’s in no danger of stopping anytime soon. 'Big Time' is a focused record that contains stunning examples of vulnerability, almost too exposed to watch. Her ability to shed layers artistically and emotionally, over and over, leaves you excited to see where her next destination may be.
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mxdwn Music
Angel Olsen’s album Big Time is an emotion-filled, country-inspired album that tells stories of love, heartbreak, grief and loss. Olsen looks through a personal lens and sings from the heart, creating an album that is sure to move listeners.
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Beats Per Minute
After all the Olsen has expressed through the record, after she’s visited every dusty corner of her sadness and excavated all of her regrets, she deserves to leave on a high – and with the closing “Chasing The Sun” she does exactly that. She takes us back to where we started, bashfully, adorably in love, and “busy doing nothing”, her honeyed whisper suggesting an isolated vista in a place nobody else can reach. In this hallowed place she’s “driving away the blues” in a gorgeous exhalation. After a series of tear-streaked missives, it feels like she’s at well-deserved peace, at last.
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DIY Magazine
Haunting, heartbreaking and life-affirming, Angel Olsen’s songwriting talents soar to great heights in the mostly restrained palette here, offering the much needed space to wrestle with the complexities life has thrown at her.
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American Songwriter
It’s an album best explored with headphones, perhaps alone and in the dark, to appreciate Wilson’s intricate instrumentation and Olsen’s intoxicating, fluid, musical dynamics. Reading the lyrics also helps absorb and intensify these bittersweet songs of hurt, desire, and occasionally, the promise of sunnier times ahead.
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Post-Trash
Big Time is a fitting title as this album feels larger in scale than her previous releases, with expansive instrumentation, horn sections and yes, even some slide guitar (that twang sound). Songs like the title track and “All The Good Times” would find themselves at home performed on Glen Campbell’s 1980’s variety hour TV show, but Olsen’s brutally honest lyrics would certainly be the distinction. Despite all the talk of scale and how this album is larger than most of Olsen’s, there are still plenty of songs here that capture Angel Olsen’s signature atmosphere of intimacy, despite the various instrumentation that backs her up.
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Americana Highways
Big Time, pushes through the dancehall doors, and if you’re able to squint your ears just right, you might just find it to be the best country album of the year.
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Our Culture Magazine
What stands out to me, somewhat oddly, as Big Time’s most resonant offering is ‘All the Flowers’, a Vashti Bunyan-esque song whose melody Olsen came up with while sunbathing one day. Though the shortest track on the album, that melody sounds timeless – the song itself reflects on the hours spent trying “To be somebody/ To be alive/ And with another,” a sentiment that echoes My Woman’s ‘Intern’. Both songs recognize, from different vantage points, that the effort can be futile. Neither reaches a staggering climax. But while ‘Intern’ swells with aching desperation, ‘All the Flowers’ lets the light shine through before it inevitably fades away. For a fleeting moment, the dream is as real as ever – small and fragile yet all-encompassing. It may not last, but it lingers no matter where you are. Like the love that blossoms on Big Time, you couldn’t imagine it any other way.
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Northern Transmissions
The journey that Olsen has been on has taken her to this exact place in time. A place where she’s accepting and comfortable yet retains the fire that has marked the work she’s down in the past. All of this comes through so wonderfully crystal clear in these songs. Big Time is a record about the highs and lows we all go through, perfect ally contextualized through her own perspective to come out inherently relatable and deliciously enjoyable in every way.
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Hotpress
Written while the 35-year-old Olsen was coming out and recorded shortly after the death of both her parents within a matter of months, it may be high on emotion, but it’s also the sound of an artist entirely comfortable in their skin.
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Narc Magazine
The compositions are pristine, sprawling and precise, and it’s herein that the strengths and the weaknesses of the record lie. Little on the record clocks in at less than four and a half minutes (the gorgeous All The Flowers is the best and most concise song on the record). This widescreen version of her songwriting allows composition to expand into wide spaces, which is at odds with the brevity of her catalogue. But it’s a set of brave decisions that really pay off.
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Far Out
Over the course of ten songs, Angel Olsen makes tumult and turmoil sound polished and pristine, creating a true triumph along the way. Life doesn’t come with a guidebook, but next time you’re feeling lost, Big Time just might be the companion you’re looking for.
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Under the Radar Magazine
The new record finds Olsen basking in new love and lost love, using her distinctive tone and quavering vibrato to great effect. Olsen leans country on Big Time, moving between lush slide guitars and piano ballads, singing of grief with a gentleness that exudes as much gratefulness as it does melancholy. Though based in the reality of Olsen’s life, these songs also have a dreamlike quality, teetering between abstraction and the tangible. Because of this, the album’s highlights are some of its most subtle: “All the Flowers” is a gorgeous, ethereal love song with Olsen’s voice floating atop a woozy bed of guitar. The song is evocative in its mood; it is easy to feel sun-drunk and in love while it’s playing.
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The Weekly Coos
Big Time is both transformative and emotionally gripping. It is rare for me to love a country album in its entirety, and this is one of those rare occasions. From its start to end, I was grasping tears while listening to Angel Olsen deliver whimsical melodies. Olsen continuously breaks down walls of vulnerability, specifically musically, but now it’s more potent. Similar to the many, I’m here for it. There are no skips in this emotional journey we take with Angel Olsen, and I hope you take that journey too.
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Treblezine
Angel Olsen’s cowgirl epic wraps up with a gorgeously gentle silver screen credit roll on “Chasing the Sun,” her sweetest affirmation of that being in love is something worth celebrating. “If you’re looking for something to do, drop everything I’m doing, nobody needs me here,” she sings. “I’ll go wherever you’re going, I’ll be somewhere near.” It’s the happy ending to the saga, the moment where the intimacy we witness isn’t doubt or pain, but in finding comfort in quiet moments and being able to let someone else in. There are tears along the way, some moments of feeling lost and alone, but as promised, we get to go out on one of the happy ones.
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Uncut
Truth, turning points and a melodious calm on her sixth.
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Stuff
It’s a liberating listen and while Eyeye is low-key for Lykke Li, it still sits at the high end of the heartbreak scale.
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Secret Meeting
Sometimes you have to take a step off the right path in order to realise what was so perfect about it. On All Mirrors, the North Carolinian stated that other people had their ‘hands in the pot,’ which separated her from the songs. So after what felt like an overt attempt to reach the ‘big time’, Angel Olsen has ironically found it – on a record with that very title – simply by being herself.
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Stereoboard
‘Big Time’ is probably her most accomplished full LP, with an expressive quality that wasn’t here before. Maybe it’s a new maturity in the artist, or the tighter constraints of country music itself—colouring between the lines can be strangely freeing. And, yes, perhaps it is in some part due to letting go and saying goodbye.
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The Needle Drop
Angel leaning more into a country sound goes over well, unsurprisingly.
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musicOMH
A record that’s testament to going through hell and coming out the other side, and one that confirms its author as one of the foremost singer-songwriters of her generation.
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Entertainment Focus
The trick of writing is that is has to be cleaner and neater than regular speech, with all its sidetracks and infelicities, but it has to feel natural, too. Olsen’s writing achieves this relaxed naturalism, and the musicianship and singing on ‘Big Time’ are first-rate too, making this an exceptional and highly enjoyable album.
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Buzz
ANGEL OLSEN’s sixth LP is stacked with instant timeless classics.
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The Independent
The singer’s sixth album is a thoroughly blissed-out affair, rocking gently in the warm breezes of vintage country.
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The Irish Times
Loss and love permeate her best album so far.
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Stack
Sonically, the record detours from the synth-based production of her last EP Aisles, instead embracing her alt-country roots, though it strikes the perfect balance between experimentation and staying true to the genre.
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The Times
the queen of gloom hits a cheery note.
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Heromag
Big Time is emotionally devastating, but never toes a line of melodrama. When Olsen confronts certain traumas, and the optimism spurred in her after a period of loss pokes through, it stands alongside the joy she feels in her own personhood and the love she holds for others. After five records, Angel Olsen arrives here emotionally lighter and singing through grief, rather than against it. There’s devastation afoot, but not without gestures of romantic and personal euphoria. She’s documenting how joyful it is to feel alive and have it make sense, and on Big Time, no grandiose, orchestral gravitas is needed to justify why.
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Nomisec
A songwriter who formerly wished that she could only buy into all that was promised to her is now a believer, soundtracking the crystalline clarity of feeling connected, at last, to herself and others.
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