Lucy Dacus – Vinyl Mag

Review: boygenius: “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry,” “True Blue”

Posted on January 21, 2023January 22, 2023 by Haley Gilbert

Oat milk latte drinkers rejoice, supergroup boygenius is officially back. Consisting of members Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, the indie-rock trio announced Wednesday that they will be releasing their long-awaited debut album The Record on March 31 with Interscope Records. In conjunction with the announcement, they released three new songs: “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry,” and “True Blue.”

Each song was led by a different member, and first up to bat was Baker. With “$20,” boygenius hits the ground running and doesn’t slow down. The song is loud, unapologetic and the lyrics are perfectly guided by Baker who meets up with her bandmates at the end of carefully selected lines to deliver them with the kind of punch that only boygenius can. This song reminds me of “Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups, except if it had been written by someone wearing Doc Martens. Ending in a scream that is equal parts loud and cathartic, this song is everything that I could ask for and then some.

Next up is “Emily I’m Sorry,” and while the song mainly features Bridgers’ vocals, Baker and Dacus weave seamlessly in and out and remind listeners what makes boygenius so special. A sharp change of pace from “$20,” the addition of “Emily I’m Sorry” shows the versatility of boygenius; the song is soft but also undeniably striking, every bit as powerful as the song that it follows yet completely different from it. This song makes me want to start a fight with one of my various friends named Emily, solely so I can then send it to them after as an apology. (I personally think that they would respect the commitment to the bit.)

Rounding out the lineup is “True Blue,” a song that has an undeniable Dacus feel. Featuring lyrics like “When you don’t know who you are / You fuck around and find out,” and “You can’t help but become the sun,” this is the type of poignant story about self-discovery, intimate relationships, and the painful complexities of life that Dacus is able to tell so beautifully.

These are songs that deserve to be played at an obnoxiously loud volume; even when the subject matter is heavy, they remain fun to listen to (and there’s something about listening to boygenius that makes me automatically feel cooler every time and for that, my ego would like to thank them). Every song released by boygenius feels like further evidence that too much of a good thing is in fact not a bad thing, but sometimes an even greater thing, and with each release it becomes more apparent that one of the trio’s greatest skills is the ability to play up the strengths of each vocalist individually and then find the perfect moments to bring them together, whether it be in carefully chosen pairs or all three members. After listening to this newly released collection of songs more times than I would like to publicly admit, I have come to the conclusion that they are all so different from each other that I genuinely have no idea what to expect from the rest of the album and I could not be more excited to find out. While we wait, check out “$20,” “Emily I’m Sorry,” and “True Blue” below.

Review: Lucy Dacus: ‘Home Video’

Posted on July 16, 2021January 20, 2023 by Buket Urgen

Home Video is a stunning collection of delicate coming-of-age moments packed with emotional vulnerability and scenic poetry. Lucy Dacus, 26, brings to life nostalgic tales of her Christian youth camp days, friends dating subpar boys, awkward firsts and confused teens replacing pop culture references for a personality. Presumably, the effectiveness comes from the way she read through her teenage diaries on the road towards the finished product. In reflecting on the past, she has masterfully (and perhaps unintentionally) created a looking glass for listeners to project their own teenage emotions and formative experiences onto.

The charm of these songs comes from Lucy’s conversational tone, wit and self-awareness. “First Time” finds Lucy confessing, “I am just the fool you took me for.” She professes via Apple Music that the song explores discovering “your body and your emotional capacity” for the first time and the fear that you’ll never feel that way again. Then she admits, “I haven’t–but I have felt other wonderful things.” “Partner in Crime” reminisces on her early relationship with an older someone; Dacus makes her first experimental step into autotune, describing her desire to pretend and act older. In a casual voice, she sings, “You drop a hint that you got a girlfriend / I tried my best not to take it” over distorted guitars.

Home Video is a glimpse at art that is so personal, intimate and vivid that the stories it tells become approachable, cozy and universal. As you zoom into the picture, you find that there’s details that you can latch onto and make yours. Its diverse palette and keen observations enables one to shapeshift. Sometimes, you feel like the songs are about you, and sometimes, you feel like you’re Lucy and you’re seeing your friends through her interpretation. In “Please Stay,” the first verse describes the unkempt house of an individual struggling to find a reason to stay alive. The outro, assisted by her boygenius bandmates, sings pleadingly and desperately for the subject of the song to do anything but leave. In another song (“Christine”), Lucy describes the way her friend justifies staying with a boy who doesn’t treat her right. With unadulterated honesty, Lucy confesses that she would risk losing her friends respect to stop them getting married if it came down to it. Throughout each song, both the observer and the subject are continuously done justice in this way.

In the end, I can’t help but wonder how it must feel for the people in Lucy’s life to hear the songs that tell their stories, to hear their worlds come alive in a picture book painted by someone else entirely. In some ways, as a listener, it feels invasive to realize that these songs implicate real people. The consequences of putting these songs out into the world are genuine and to some degree, change how one consumes them. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone Music Now, Lucy describes the anxiety of anticipating to hear from the subjects of her songs. She confesses that the subject of “Brando” contacted her after the song was released and expressed hurt. On the other hand, “Thumbs” and “Christine” are two songs that she asked for permission to record from the people it’s about. Songs like “Triple Dog Dare,” “Cartwheel,” and “VBS” could still be conversations waiting to happen between Lucy and the people she is singing to, which is the price paid for hyper-specificity. She acknowledges that some of these conversations she welcomes and others she would dread but leaves you guessing as to which category they fall under.

When the world shut down in March 2020, we were forced to spend time thinking about the past because there was literally nothing else to do. There was nothing happening in the now and nothing to look towards or anticipate. Although recorded before quarantine, Home Video somehow captures this feeling, at least for me. This album is unique in that it reflects on pivotal moments in one’s life from the end of the road, yet the distance isn’t so far that the details have become hazy, and the aftereffects have been lost during interpretation.

Home Video is available for listening on all streaming platforms.

Lucy Dacus: ‘Historian’

Posted on March 2, 2018March 2, 2018 by Emma Korstanje

After her 2016 debut, No Burden, Lucy Dacus was hailed as one of rock’s most promising new players. With her sophomore release, Historian on March 2, Dacus fulfills that promise—and then some.

Dacus’ delicate—but not in any way frail—vocals lead the way through the album, which almost feels like a rambling stroll through a narrative carefully sculpted with tattoo-worthy one-liners. The album screams maturity, carrying a sense of depth and knowledge that many decades-older veteran musicians at times struggle to grasp. In Historian, Dacus asks the big questions and allows herself vulnerable realizations while simultaneously staking her ground and declaring her space in rock music anyway.

The album opens with “Night Shift,” a track that’s equally heartbreaking and beautiful. Opening slowly, the track grows, seeming as if it’s never going to end but in a way that’s entirely positive. Though not one of the biggest stand-outs on the album, its a nice opener to the lineup.

The first real kicker in the album is the third track, “The Shell.” Upon opening, the song almost feels like being drunk at a party, a great party, but nevertheless still trapped in one’s own head. With lines like “I am busy doing nothing and you’re rudely interrupting/ It’s a myth but now I see it clearly / You don’t have to be sad to make something worth hearing,” the lines feel like a stream-of-consciousness, but somehow still entirely relatable.

The real shining moment of the track is towards its end—a trend that will come up again as the album progresses. The last third of the track almost evolves outside of this stream-of-consciousness to something wholly other, with the instrumental taking front in a way that builds similarly to that of great psychedelic ballads, entirely unexpected but definitely nice.

Next, to look at “Yours and Mine,” another standout in the lineup. She amps up the vocals on this track, bringing in some heavier, but still simple, harmonies to round out the lead—proving that Dacus doesn’t need to do crazy things with her vocals for her vocals to be crazy good. The best moment on this track, however, is the guitar solo rounding out the end. It’s fuzzy, it doesn’t feel overdone, and it seems to perfectly compliment the rest of the song in a nice juxtaposition.

“Body to Flame,” the sixth track, is practically cinematic in its greatness. It’s fairly calm, ambling, before Dacus belts, “Laughing aloud at the spinning stars” and the track explodes. It’s fuzzy, it’s a sensory-overload, it’s fazing in-and-out and it’s exactly what the album needs. With lines like “I see you holding your breath with your arms outstretched/ Waiting for someone to come rip open your chest,” the track almost feels like a Joan Didion essay, giving you all of the details you didn’t know you wanted—but somehow Dacus did.

Finally, the funkiest track on the album, “Timefighter.” This particular song feels self-assured, as if written by someone confident enough to walk away from a love and be able survive the fallout. It’s groovy and definitely a track you can lay back into and get comfortable with, just swaying to the beat as she spells out the story. This track, again, shines in guitar solos, but this time they’re particularly gritty, rough, and harsh on the edges. Further, the almost staccato stop-and-go towards the middle of the song shows her own self-restraint as an artist, her own maturity to know when to pull back. It fits, so well, in the overall narrative—proving her own badness in the best way possible.

On her sophomore album, Lucy Dacus confidently strode into the world of rock—showing that though it’s just her second album, she already has the chops to be a mainstay in the industry.

9/10