Tom Dunne: Boygenius have already produced the best record of the year
Boy Genius: Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker.
I know it’s only early April, the darling buds are barely out, Eurovision still a distant threat, but honestly, if a better album than this is released in 2023, hats will be bought and served with skinny fries. Boygenius, The Record, is SUPERB.
I am having to rein in my excitement. I don’t want to come across as an overexcited child who spots a magician carrying gifts walking up the drive, but this is special. In the words of the late Jimmy Magee, it is, “different class”.
They say four great songs and no duds makes for a ‘classic’ album. If so, the run from ‘Emily, I’m Sorry’, to ‘True Blue’ to ‘Cool About it’ to ‘Not Strong Enough’ puts The Record firmly in that category. It deserves to be purchased and pored over. It is not by accident that a Pulitzer-nominated author, Elif Batumen, has written the sleeve notes.
Boygenius took its first tentative steps towards life when Julien Baker spotted Lucy Dacus reading a copy of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, backstage at a gig in America in 2016. They bonded over a shared love of literature and letters were exchanged.
I too would have formed a band with someone reading Portrait. Its tale of a young American woman on the cusp of adulthood in England has haunted me since the Leaving Cert. Her line that it is her “destiny to be unhappy” still lives with me.
A month after meeting Dacus, Baker formed a similar bond with Phoebe Bridgers and the three started swapping books and poetry. In 2018 when they found themselves on the same bill, they decided to record a song together. They recorded six and Boygenius was born.
Since then, they have maintained separate solo careers but recognised that as they wrote songs, some seemed to belong more instinctively to this “band” space than to their own albums. So, some were earmarked and put aside. This is the result.
It is a supergroup in a world where so many are neither ‘groups’ nor ‘super’. The musicians include Jay Som’s Melina Duterte on bass and Autolux’s Carla Azar on drums. Sarah Tudzin from Illuminati Hotties is studio engineer and Catherine Marks co-produces with industry legend Tony Berg.
But it’s the songs, the lyrics, the wry observations, and the intertwining vocals that so lift the album. That and the feeling that theirs is a friendship they value above all else. Plus, the playfulness, the re-creation of Crosby, Stills and Nash artwork on the debut, the knowing, muso jokes.
There is an air of Paul Simon’s America about the album and particularly that moment where he sings, with all that fragile emotion; “’Cathy I’m lost,’ I said, though I knew she was sleeping. ‘I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why’.” That song, released in 1968, struck a chord with young people the world over. It was a heady time to be alive and to be young. There was a sense of change in the world and for that generation; this was ‘their time’. Wiping the sleep from their eyes and swapping cigarettes, they headed off “to look for America".
Boygenius seem to pick up that narrative 45 years later. That America has been found and found out. This America is what’s left, an America of deep division and anger, drug epidemics, and dreams toured sour.
And yet, you are with your best friends, in a band together. You are listening to Sufjan Stevens and Elliot Smith and referencing The Cure’s ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ and Leonard Cohen’s “horny poetry”. This is the band anyone stumbling from the wreckage of The Last Of Us, would hope to find on the car stereo.
Boygenius tread that line, between that naive optimism of youth, that utterly precious unicorn world and that wearying, dreary, unavoidable adult mainland. They want to stay true to youth and friends and beliefs and dreams, but they are not blind to reality either.
This is why they have employed the service of a group therapist in preparation for their upcoming tour. Tours are hard on everything and friendships like this are worth fighting for.
The album opens with a song called ‘Without You, Without Them’. It expresses gratitude to people like our fathers and our mothers for the gifts we have received, and a hope that these are gifts that can now be passed on.
It is modest and grateful. Without these people, it implies, we would be nothing. This album sets a high bar for 2023.
