I feel it is really only fitting that the first album review the world will see from me is a boygenius album. I will absolutely be biased. Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker have all separately altered my brain chemistry, and I think that the three of them together is the most lethal combination lyrically that any higher power could manage to put on this earth and into the hands of unstable 20-year-olds.

The overall theme of “the record” seems to be healing. Important work, especially from three musicians who have made careers centered on writing the most gut-wrenching music you’ve ever heard. The mastermind behind the group is Lucy Dacus, writer extraordinaire, a woman who needs an introduction as a generation-defining poet that could tear your psyche apart in a few sentences. Who needs to spend months in therapy when a line from Lucy Dacus can crack your emotional baggage open like a soft-boiled egg and leave you to spend 4 months cleaning up the yolk and listening to her albums on repeat. While I deeply appreciate the work of all three of our leading ladies, Dacus by far holds the top spot for me personally. My favorite thing to do in this album is figure out who wrote what, and I think that Lucy Dacus stands out. Dacus writes songs like they’re from her notes app in her car in a McDonalds drive-thru at 12:30 p.m. on a Thursday. She writes like she had to pull over to get the words out.

My favorite song on the album is “True Blue.” “True Blue” is one of my favorite songs of all time. First of all, I have seldom heard a song referring to platonic love that has managed to have the same emotional impact as a song about romantic love. They are equally as intense, but people rarely write about what it means to have a complicated, overwhelmingly loving and emotionally deep relationship with someone you aren’t romantically interested in, but Lucy, Phoebe, and Julien did. It’s lyrically relevant. “True Blue,” encapsulates what it means to miss someone, to follow their life. I think that there is something so important to me with a song that focuses on the painful process of being known on an intrinsic level by someone else. My favorite line from the song is “When you called me from Chicago/ water freezing in your eyes/ you were happy/ and I wasn’t surprised.” Because how do you get better than a song about moving to a new city and loving in a new way. It is gorgeous and unmatched, and I love it.

My favorite songs off the album, other than “True Blue” are “Leonard Cohen”, an short ode, sort of, to the famous composer, “With You Without Them”, a short and sweet barbershop harmony piece that features a love of personal history, “Emily I’m Sorry” a song about forgiveness and “Anti-Curse” which feels like a painful explanation of love, combined with some female rage, my personal favorite genre of music. In that song, the guitar riffs are almost like another voice, and I love to see this group create more upbeat content that borders on the “rock” side of indie rock. That stylistic choices are one of the many components that make this album, and this group, unlike any other.

The most impressive piece to me is “Letter From An Old Poet” which is a continuation of the song “Me and My Dog” off of boygenius’ first album, the self-titled “boygenius.” Its lyrics capture the feel for most of the album, sentiments such as “I want to be happy/ I’m ready/ to walk in my room/ and not look for you” and “You made me feel like an equal/ But I’m better than you/ You should know that by now.” For the closing song of this album, we have Phoebe Bridgers to
thank, and thank her we should. Bridgers gets a lot of credit for her slow, mellow music, which is addressed in the song, but I especially like the side of her writing that is angry. If Dacus’ writing is frantic and desperate to be heard, Bridgers writes like the long amalgamation of feeling, like she’s in a situation where she thinks and thinks until it’s a devastating pain that can be put to paper.

“the record” is a lyrically enticing, harmonically sound, gorgeous piece of art that has something worth listening to for any music lover. It defies genre, existing between the realms of indie, rock, and alternative.