By Imogen Abbott
Boygenius’s 2023 album, The Record, is an affirmation of the potential supergroups hold.
Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, and Julien Baker are each emotionally mature and lyrically poetic, so when that intensity was multiplied by three and then combined with inner circle feelings of platonic and romantic love, the final sum was compelling and overwhelmingly sensuous.
With each song revealing the personal inner workings of the trio to an audience via dynamic harmonies and Fender Telecasters, this album was able to draw the listener into the friendship.
Rolling Stone senior writer Kory Grow agrees, writing in the 100 Best Albums of 2023, where The Record impressively came second, that “each song maintains an intimacy that makes you feel included”.
He quotes a line from the opening track of the album Without You, Without Them: “I want you to hear my story and be a part of it.”
Not even 90 seconds long, this is the perfect opening track for their first and only album as it sets the listener up for an emotionally connected experience. The harmony articulates the types of connection: between the trio, with the audience, with family, and with self.
Who would I be without you, without them?
This album was also highly rated by Pitchfork, coming fourth on Best Music of 2023. Associate editor Cat Zhang described the album as “a kind of love that rejects the ingrained impulse for women to route their emotional, spiritual, and erotic attention away from their peers and toward men”.
The Record’s most popular song was Not Strong Enough, which came third on Pitchfork’s best songs list, and held the No.1 spot on the Billboard Adult Alternative Airplay chart for seven weeks.
The artistry of the musicians is shown within this song of paradoxes. Bridgers explained that thematically the song is an exploration of “self-hatred plus having a god complex”.
An ostinato harmony towards the back end of the song showcases this: “Always an angel, never a God.”
The closer of The Record, Letter to an Old Poet, is in a way a reprise, having ties to the hit song Me & My Dog from their self-titled 2018 ep.
Me & My Dog is a song about having anxiety because of a person, longing to not feel that anxiety, and wanting your dog to comfort you. The lyrics in Letter to an Old Poet are direct antonyms to the ones in the 2018 track, showing the character growth of the storyteller.
| Me & My Dog | Letter to an Old Poet |
| “I want to be happy” | “I want to be emaciated” |
| “I’m ready to walk into my room without looking for you” | “I want to hear one song without thinking of you” |
| “And remember my dog when I see the full moon” | “Just me and my dog and an impossible view” |
With this reiteration, fans feel like they have come full circle with the band, following along with the emotional journeys expressed in the music, together.
In a way, this song does complete this circle of the band’s journey, with them announcing at an acoustic set in downtown LA this February that they are “going away for the foreseeable future”. This was confirmed to Pitchfork by the group’s representatives the following day.
Featured image: Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus of boygenius. Picture: WFUV Public radio/CC/flickr
