Few people can build a a harmony quite like boygenius. Hell, few people an encompass the term “supergroup” like boygenius (Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus). In 2018, when the band first came together, by chance and falling headfirst into a gut feeling, it was like a magic spell. A rip in the portal. Six songs, One EP, a short tour. They coalesced, then they parted. Magic, like lightning, doesn’t happen twice. Except when it does.
Five years later, a new album each, a few collaborations older, and the boygenius boys found each other again. But this time, the have a few new tricks and blades up their sleeves — among them sicker guitar riffs, modern Americana folktales, and references to fellow musicians: everyone from Sheryl Crow and Simon & Garfunkel to Taylor Swift, the Bible, and their own past selves.
They also have new stories to tell. While the past EP were mournful eulogies to the solitude of moving through the world, the new album is the opposite: twelve odes to the transformative power of human connection and being known, in spite of all the world is. As Dacus sings, it feels good to be known so well. But this joy isn’t just ordinary euphoria — it’s the defiant kind, the female kind, the queer kind, the kind that fuels the insistence of staying in the world in spite of what it is. Inasmuch as love and friendship and human connection are things that happen to us, boygenius shows what might be if we took power over those chances, held tight to them, and made them our own.
But — and anyone knows this — human connection comes at a cost. To be seen is to risk being scrutinized and recoiled at, feelings the boygenius members are only all too familiar with. But real friendship is a rarity — the kind that sits with you at Sunday morning, and that wouldn’t second-guess joining you into anarchy. Ultimately, to be seen is a precursor to being loved. We are only an ever-growing collage of those we let in and really see us.
So much of “the record” are hypothetical questions, of the kind that plague any relationship, and then followed by choruses of reassurances, like incantations or affirmations of the kind of loyalty that nothing in the world can break. Until all three voices, all three signature sounds, coalesce together in a wall of sound and harmony, loud enough to drown out all the violence of the world.
The album, a month in the making (but really a lifetime in coming together) was released this past Friday. Already it posseses the age-old wisdom and clarity of a classic. The music imprints itself, and what a privilege to be on the receiving end. What a radical joy to bear witness. it sure feels good to be seen, even from many miles away, and be known so hauntingly well.
