Music historical past is stuffed with supergroups, however there’s by no means been one like boygenius, which is why the label doesn’t do them justice. They’re merely a world-beatingly nice band, with three of probably the most sensible singer-songwriters within the recreation. Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus all got here into boygenius with their very own completely distinct kinds, to not point out their very own hardcore audiences, teaming up with a communal pass-the-mic spirit. They’ve lastly dropped their long-awaited full-length debut with The Document — however it’s even higher than everyone had hoped.
There’s no mistaking these particular person voices. However the energy of boygenius is how one thing bizarre, unpredictable, and barely harmful occurs when these three musical minds meld. Throughout The Document, they show they’re a band that may do all of it, hitting peaks collectively that may’t be reached every other method.
The Document is a big leap from the unique six-song EP that boygenius dropped on an unsuspecting world in 2018. That was the sound of three very totally different indie-rock poets having a bash at becoming a member of their voices, but discovering that alchemical connection. All three had been coming off triumphant solo breakthroughs — Dacus’ Historian, Baker’s Flip Out the Lights, Bridgers’ Stranger within the Alps. But they had been as shocked by the outcomes as anybody else. It won’t be a coincidence all of them moved from boygenius to make even larger albums — Dacus’ Dwelling Video, Baker’s Little Oblivions, Bridgers’ Punisher.
However boygenius made The Document as a band-band, self-consciously going for a bunch id that’s totally different from the sum of the components. The album is paced to circulate like an old-school LP, with 12 songs in 42 minutes, splicing straight-for-the-jugular songs with detours and in-jokes. It’s a gloriously expansive rock & roll assertion, buzzing with bravado and power-jangle air-guitar bangers facet by facet with introspective acoustic whispers.
Emotionally, these tunes are pissed off ceaselessly, love-sick usually, messy at all times. But the characters right here at all times appear to have heads full of music, translating their emotions into sound. For them, as Baker sings within the improbable “Anti-Curse,” falling in love looks like “writing phrases/To the worst love tune you’ve ever heard/Sounding out the international characters.”
It was only a week after Bridgers launched her epochal 2020 masterwork Punisher that she emailed a demo to the opposite two and requested, “Can we be a band once more?” They labored on The Document in secrecy with co-producer Catherine Marks at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. (They spent a month making it, fairly a change from the 2018 EP, which they needed to crash out in 4 days.) The outcomes appear to reply Bridgers’ query with one other query: How might boygenius ever not be a band?
They gave their first style of the brand new music in January, to go along with their Rolling Stone cowl: three lead singles, every written individually by a special one of many boys. Baker’s “$20,” Bridgers’ “Emily I’m Sorry,” and Dacus’ “True Blue.” However the remainder of these tunes are deeper collaborations. They’ll attempt something — as Baker sings within the killer opening line of “$20,” “It’s a foul concept, and I’m all about it.”
“Not Sturdy Sufficient” reveals off the creative sonics — opening with just a few strums of Joni Mitchell guitar earlier than swooshing into Nineteen Eighties New Order, with a refrain that tweaks Sheryl Crow’s traditional “Sturdy Sufficient,” although the verses go extra for the moldy-bread vibe of “If It Makes You Completely happy” or “A Change Would Do You Good.” Baker cheerily sings, “Drag racing via the canyon/Singing ‘Boys Don’t Cry’/Do you see us getting scraped up off the pavement?”
“Revolution 0” (dig that intelligent White Album title) is Bridgers’ breathy, pained ballad of long-distance need, as she muses, “Imaginary good friend, you reside up in my head,” constructing to the query: “If it isn’t love, then what the fuck is it?” The banjo-driven “Cool About It” weaves three totally different tales of post-breakup conferences gone horribly mistaken. “As soon as I took your remedy to know what it’s like,” Bridgers confesses in a stiletto-sharp murmur. “Now I’ve to behave like I can’t learn your thoughts/I ask you the way you’re doing and I allow you to lie.”
Dacus made her title with long-bomb soliloquies that construct into soul exorcisms, like “Night time Shift,” “Map on a Wall,” and “Triple Canine Dare.” Like Leonard Cohen, who evokes one in every of her tunes right here, she’s a songwriter who likes to hit her stride on the seven-minute mark. She reaches that energy with the album’s spotlight, “We’re in Love,” a towering ballad the place she sifts via fragments of damaged tales, attempting to make them match collectively. “Some October, sooner or later, I’ll run out of trash TV,” Dacus predicts. “I’ll be lonely so I’ll stroll to karaoke/Singing the tune you wrote about me/By no means as soon as checking the phrases.” However even on the karaoke bar, it’s too rattling intense to withstand the feelings in that tune. As she provides, “I hope that no person sings alongside/I hope that I’m not a daily.”
And simply in case the tune hasn’t fairly destroyed you at this level, “We’re in Love” takes a flip on the finish when she flips one in every of Taylor Swift’s most wittiest lyrical asides — “I might go on and on and on/And I’ll,” from the 1989 deep minimize “This Love,” with all three boygeniuses singing alongside. That is undoubtedly the cancel-your-week emotional massacre of the album.
boygenius go to their different sonic excessive for “Anti-Curse,” with Baker’s powerhouse voice over guitar/synth-rock slam-o-rama, someplace between The Joshua Tree and “Since U Been Gone.” She sings a few private reckoning, with spectacularly atmospheric drum rolls. In her second of reality, she tells herself, “You don’t must make it dangerous/Simply because you know the way.” The one-two punch of “We’re in Love” and “Anti-Curse” sums up boygenius’ rock bravado. Throughout The Document, they hold recombining their particular person kinds into a special sort of chemistry for every tune. That’s why they transcend any sort of “supergroup” cliché. In any case, supergroups are a dime a dozen in comparison with precise nice bands. And boygenius depart little doubt about the place they stand.
