Boygenius

Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker discuss dealing with fame, speaking out for LGBTQ+ rights, and more ahead of their debut album, the record.

[carabiners](https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/12/the-lesbian-love-of-key-rings-and-carabiners-explained.html), astrological charts, and [favorite coffee shops](https://www.gq.com/story/iced-coffee-gay-rights). The three are of varying levels of astrological conversance; Phoebe Bridgers, 28, and Julien Baker, 27 turn to Lucy Dacus, 27, for explanation. Timed roughly to your 27th year, in astrological terms it marks the end of your twenties, when you’re forced to stop engaging with yourself as a reaction to others and to decide who it is you are and what you care about. (The latter two subjects do come up, partially because of one member’s affinity for [proletariat coffee](https://boykeats.tumblr.com/post/147855002647/julien-bakers-love-for-dunkin-donuts-keeps-me)). [resident astrological expert](https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5wdjg/reading-lucy-dacus-birth-chart-and-finding-her-place-in-the-universe) of the three, clarifies. But the bleach blonde in the L7 graphic tee and jeans would be on stage at Madison Square Garden in the same fit, [singing her verse](https://pitchfork.com/news/watch-phoebe-bridgers-and-cardi-b-join-sza-at-msg/) from the artist’s record-breaking 2022 album SOS with her bandmates in the audience.

On a debut album for the ages, Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker hold each other up through the self-doubt of their twenties.

At the core of ‘The Record’ is a desire to be understood – by loved ones and ourselves; a daily concern for therapised zillennials and life’s overthinkers. For anyone who finds each of the individual artists’ work a little one-note, will find plenty to grab on to here, that magic blend of similar-yet-different-enough styles meshing in perfect harmony (quite literally, on the album opener). The Baker tracks – if we are to assign them that way – rock a little harder and offer some of the album’s most festival-ready and euphoric moments. On ‘Revolution O’ – a track that wouldn’t sound out of place on the Grammy-nominated ‘ Fast forward five years and the band are one of the most exciting groups on the planet. A collaborative single, recorded on the road, turned into a self-titled EP and tour dates followed: their name a knowing nod at the “genius” status so often afforded to male musicians.

The songwriter supergroup's full-length debut screams out its manic heartaches and unrolls stories with a quiet resonance—and just plain rips as an ...

the record serves as a series of incandescent reminders of each musical superpower from the trio—Baker’s electric guitar theatrics (“Satinist”) warp each song with a revelatory spirit; Dacus continues to demonstrate her ability as a songwriter to build out scenes with true psychological locomotion (“Leonard Cohen”); and Bridgers’ stirring, raw-nerve lyrics (“Letter to an Old Poet”) dress down each character’s fuck-around-and-find-out baggage. The bridge drives home those feelings of guilt and shame with such a simple repeated line: “Always an angel, never a god.” It wraps up that tangled feeling of being dragged down by the darkest recesses of your mind, but the delivery of those lines by a trio of strong voices hints at a glimmer of hope. The merits of boygenius were apparent from the trio’s first appetizer EP, but the record still manages to feel like only the first course of a much larger feast. The album begins with a beautiful vocals-only track, “Without You Without Them.” It speaks to the mysterious power of family—whether biological or based on community bonds, like boygenius itself. [Julien Baker](http://floodmagazine.com/t/julien-baker/), [Phoebe Bridgers](http://floodmagazine.com/t/phoebe-bridgers/), and [Lucy Dacus](http://floodmagazine.com/t/lucy-dacus/) teamed up to release an impressive debut EP together as [boygenius](http://floodmagazine.com/t/boygenius). The first track is also just a nice connecting piece to where the group’s debut self-titled EP left off with “Ketchum, ID.” The folk streaks continue later on with the banjo-led “Cool About It,” where each singer takes a turn at the mic.

NPR's Miles Parks speaks to Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus about their first full-length album, as well as defining their band and their ...

Then Lucy suggested — because I was like, "I'm feeling like this and I'm feeling like this and I'm feeling this" — what if you just say, "I want to be happy?" Bridgers: I just started writing a song that I was like, god, I have to stop writing this. It is about to be that!" The way that I've been writing a lot of love songs recently and I feel myself being like, this is overplayed or this isn't profound in the slightest, but I can pick any one of my friends and write something that is just completely unique to them. Bridgers: It's just funny to me that if anybody interrogates that lyric, the only way that it happened is if you're in a Tesla. Julien and I were like, "That was awesome, um, you're going to have to turn around though." I want to turn to you, Lucy, and talk about this awesome short song called "Leonard Cohen" on the album that opens with this kind of vignette [about driving]. She was like, "Y'all need to shut up and listen to this." Lucy Dacus: I always thought that that line is the essential context for the chorus because it's like the person convinced you of the lie. She got on the interstate the wrong way, and I noticed part way through the song, but she was so serious. One of the themes that I hear a lot as I've listened to this record is digging into intimacy. There aren't a lot of supergroups that are greater than the sum of their parts, I don't think.