boygenius
the record
Interscope
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The super group is a complicated animal: multiple musicians with their own trademark (and yet, still evolving) styles, consolidating their visions into one. In one sense, you’re doomed no matter what: you either end up with a collection of disparate tracks siloed by several different approaches or you end up with a fusion of sounds that feels different from anything the band members have done before, negating the effectiveness of their names and sounds as draws for the project.
There are undoubtedly moments on the record that adopt the first approach. “Emily I’m Sorry” opens with Phoebe Bridgers’ now-trademark deadened guitar tone; it sounds like it could have been lifted straight off Punisher (2020). Meanwhile, “True Blue” carries the lilting groove that defines great tunes like “VBS” from Lucy Dacus’ Home Video (2021, and “Satanist” presents a vocal melody layered over a drum machine that shares DNA with “Favor” from Julien Baker’s Little Oblivions (2021). But the record is saved from the sense that we’re just getting three EPs smashed together through its collison course of visions, not in spite of them.
The most obvious place to find a middle ground is the shared vocals—they do help. “Satanist” stops feeling like a Little Oblivions song once Bridgers jumps into the verse and disconnects the instrumental from associations with Baker’s recent work. But the foundation of the record is the tunes that sound like they belong to no one, and by extension, belong to the whole group.
The lynchpin is “Cool About It,” a humble acoustic tune in a classic verse-trading formula. By reaching for a standard format, the trio subvert connections to their own sounds and catalogues, allowing us to focus on boygenius as a collection of people, rather than a collection of artists we already know…kind of like the way you would listen to a regular band. It certainly helps that “Cool About It” is one of the most devastating and immersive pieces of writing that any of the band members has ever put out (particularly Bridgers’ verse). The song compels you to suspend disbelief for just a minute and think of this record not as a watershed moment in modern indie rock, but as a collection of undeniable songs by a single voice.
The second half of the record generally builds on where “Cool About It” left off, tapping into classic sounds to create shared ownership. “Not Strong Enough” leans into power pop, “Revolution 0” is our tender, wintry acoustic track, and “Anti-Curse” is a turbulent, indie rock classic. boygenius don’t have a sound, per se, but they do have an ethic: wielding a wide musical repertoire to drill into a core set of questions around relationships, mental health, and existential dread.
But, all of this does culminate in a special place: the chorus of “Letter To An Old Poet” is essentially a re-write of “Me And My Dog,” the tune that gave us the definitive boygenius moment until this point. While a gesture like this might strike some listeners as self-indulgent and obvious (oh look, we’ve changed in five years and we’re going to re-write an old tune to prove it), it straight-up made me cry the first time I heard it. The band asks you to let your guard down, dispense with the cynicism that sometimes comes with listening to Serious Music, and just implore you to take it as it is. It’s boygenius delivering something that is definitively theirs—not a remix, not a turn-taking exercise, not a highly-anticipated full-length debut, but a flag in the ground that says “we did this.” Music on its own terms.
the record does not have a definitive through-line. There’s not a sound, or a vocalist, or a lyrical approach that defines it. But its lack of center is very much the point: three gifted musicians looking at the calamity of our modern world and saying, “here’s what we’ve got.” But it starts with an a cappella, shared vocal and ends with a definitive band-oriented statement, pulling all of this confusion, bewilderment, and occasional enlightenment under one collective banner.
Notable Tracks: “$20” | “Cool About It” | “Letter To An Old Poet”
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