Boygenius – ‘The Record’ album review
Now this is a supergroup. The prevailing wisdom around the infamous term for when already-famous people start up a new band is that the group is very rarely super. Maybe they can’t go back to their original bands, maybe they need some money, or maybe they’re just bored and want to experiment with their famous pals. Either way, the list of actual quality supergroups is relatively short, but you have to make room for Boygenius on that list.
Then comes ‘$20’, one of the best songs that Baker has ever written. A dust-filled road trip nostalgia-fest, ‘$20’ is easily the coolest riff on the record and one of the coolest rock riffs of the last decade. Everyone gets locked into the song’s 7/4 groove like it’s completely natural, and as Baker wonders how long her favourite Chevy has been on cinderblocks, Dacus and Bridgers poke and prod the song every chance they get. By the end, Bridgers is screaming out the title amount of dough, building to a peak that crashes and burns right as it hits its apex.
Bridgers then steps up for the intimate and highly personal ode to an ex, ‘Emily I’m Sorry’. As the member with the biggest magnifying glass on her, she decides not to shy away from the attention and instead plunder the depths of her real life in order to find some kind of catharsis in song. When she chokes out the line “You called me a fucking liar”, it’s both heartbreaking and highly meme-worthy, a strange line that Bridgers toes better than anyone else in the world.
Dacus’ ‘True Blue’ also gets so specific that it’s impossible to imagine that it didn’t actually happen. While the general public has the receipts to show for ‘Emily I’m Sorry’, I haven’t found any for ‘True Blue’. The track illustrates something that’s clear from the get-go on The Record: all three singers have their own voices, but those individual ideas get elevated once the others come in.
After the album’s first three singles, Boygenius shed their individual tendencies and honed in on their power as a band. ‘Cool About It’ channels Baker’s expertise in folk and country, with a delicate banjo line flowing through Baker’s ruminations on cowboys and neck tattoos before Dacus interjects with a verse about impossible expectations, and Bridgers closes it out by taking a partner’s medication to feel how they feel. The stark heartbreak that flows through The Record will be fodder for generations of dour teens to come, but even the most steely of listeners will find it hard not to plug into the group’s collective pain on ‘Cool About It’.
Keeping up the all-for-one egalitarian style of ‘Cool About It’, ‘Not Strong Enough’ also features all three members trading off verses. Bridgers kicks things off, struggling to find some sense of stability as the room spins around her. Baker takes over for a nostalgic second verse about modern motorheads before Dacus ties a ribbon on the song by defiantly refusing to ascend to a higher place. Instead, the final chant of “Always an angel/ Never a god” grounds the track, keeping some necessary perspective on the way humans love to deify each other.
Compared to the barely-contained rage in ‘Not Strong Enough’, ‘Revolution 0’ takes a much more contemplative and ragged look at revenge. Hearing Bridgers threaten to kick someone’s teeth in is wonderfully on brand, especially when the trio’s heavenly harmonies add a smoothed-out layer to a song that brings in ruminations on death, fourth-wall breaking thoughts on songwriting, and Bridgers’ hushed Elliott Smith-like whisper. An entire orchestra’s worth of instruments swirl around her, but nobody ever gets above that delicate touch that Bridgers puts on ‘Revolution 0’.
Just as things threaten to get too emotionally raw, Dacus pulls the rug out with the tragicomedy of ‘Leonard Cohen’. Riding shotgun with a crazed driver going way too fast while spilling their guts, Dacus once again does what she does best by striking down the too-cool-and-emotional type of guy who thinks he’s on a higher plane because he listens to the titular artist.
Dacus doesn’t even blink when she eviscerates Cohen as a “an old man having an existential crisis at a Buddist monastery writing horny poetry.” Jesus, Lucy, he’s already dead, you don’t have to murder him a second time. It’s not slanderous just to provoke a reaction either: it all relates back to this hapless driver who can’t accept that being open and honest is actually a positive thing. It’s all here and gone in less than two minutes, but it’s one of the most memorable moments on the entire album.
There’s a lot of gentle folk on The Record. Perhaps sensing that it’s time to get some more hairy rock and roll on the table, Baker once again revs up the engines and plugs into the distorted glib devil-worshipping of ‘Satanist’. Sinning never sounded so good, especially when you’re looking for a vacation home in Florida while trying to score some “off-brand Ectasy” with Baker as your co-pilot. Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds like a pretty good vacation.
There’s a lot going on in ‘Satanist’: Bridgers wants to kill the bourgeoisie, spray paint her name on an ATM, and then burn the cash. Dacus turns to nihilism, citing Ecclesiastes (of all things) by embracing the holiness of stupidity before cheekily embracing self-belief once the void becomes a snoozefest. If you like your Boygenius songs to be catchy, high-impact, hard-rocking, and sly, then ‘Satanist’ is your cut, even as it sinks into the darkness of a slowed-down coda.
Dacus once again steps up for the album’s most startlingly stark devotional track, ‘We’re In Love’. A kickback at all the traditional and nontraditional ways to show affection and devotion, Dacus begs instead for silence, solace, and understanding on ‘We’re In Love’. It’s thorny and beautiful, just like real-life love. If you’re not careful, ‘We’re In Love’ could absolutely break you if you happen to be in a vulnerable place.
Baker then takes us to the beach for the spiralling ‘Anti-Curse’. Instead of sunny optimism, Baker’s beach trip is filled with yearning and uncertainty. This would seem like the right setting for a mellow acoustic number, but Baker instead chooses to keep things rolling with a driving beat and a guitar line that recalls Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since U Been Gone’. As the chorus comes, so too does an explosive sense of catharsis, with faults and faulty feelings dropping away in the cleansing tones of the song’s rich rock arrangement.
Bridgers gets the final word on ‘Letter to an Old Poet’. It’s the kind of song that will have fans bending over backwards decoding its lyrics, with direct references to Bridgers’ songwriting and highly-specific lines about relationships on their last legs adding an impossible-to-resist layer of intrigue. Bridgers refuses to see eye-to-eye with her former partner, defiantly proclaiming that she’s better than them and that they should know that by now. It’s a harrowing send-off to an album filled with broken emotions and unflinching melancholy.
Living up to hype is one thing. Succeeding it is another. But The Record somehow goes beyond those metrics – it could very well be the best album that all three singers have made to date, and there’s a chance that it could be the best album that they ever make. With no egos and more talent than some small countries, The Record is what happens when three people at the height of their collective powers come together and create something bigger than the sum of its parts.
If we never get another Boygenius album, then that’s absolutely fine, because The Record is about as close to perfect as it could possibly be.
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