Album review: The Record, by Boygenius - impressive stuff from Phoebe Bridgers and co
Boygenius - comprised of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker - have just released The Record.
- Boygenius
- The Record
- ★★★★☆
Supergroups have a reputation for bloated egos and for adding up to less than the sum of their parts. One of the motives for this teaming up of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus was to undercut that idea of the supergroup as a vehicle for grandiosity and excess.
The argument the trio make simply by working together is that artists can get in a room and turn their creative differences into a strength rather than a weakness.
The Record, it must be said, isn’t as supremely effervescent as their debut EP from 2018, where the three posed alongside one another in a callback to the cover of Crosby, Stills and Nash. This time around the production is slicker, to the occasional detriment of the material, and there is more of a delineation between the artists– you always know who is singing each number, which wasn’t the case previously, when everything felt gloriously intertwined.
Still, at its best, it is breathtaking. Baker is the most accomplished rocker in the line-up and delivers an early high-point on '$20', a cage-rattler that orbits her longstanding theme of self-destruction as a lifestyle choice. She laments, not for the first time, that sometimes it’s more satisfying to feel bad that not feel anything at all.
Dacus, for her part, steps up on 'True Blue', a plangent ballad which dips into the nostalgia that characterised her 2021 LP Home Video, where she recast her adolescence as a sort of John Hughes, coming-of-age melodrama.
Of the three, Bridgers is by far the most famous. Her fanbase exploded during lockdown, drawn to her goth aesthetic and her rugged indie songs (Boygenius is only very nominally “indie” – The Record being released through a major label). She is also the lowest key of the trio: her most powerful contribution is Emily I’m Sorry, a drifty ballad that plunges into whirlpools of introversion, the abstruse lyrics revealing little about her recent breakup from Paul Mescal.
Beautifully understated, The Record deconstructs the cliche of the supergroup. It is a celebration of community and of solidarity –one of the most gorgeously raw albums you will encounter this year.
