The first full album from Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker proves a supergroup can spotlight individual strengths and communal fun, both.
The three women of Boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — have made alluding to their forebears a hallmark of their band. Witness the cover of their first EP in 2018, when they re-created the casual iconography of the debut album sleeve of a prior supergroup — Crosby, Stills & Nash — or when they posed as Nirvana on a recent Rolling Stone cover. On their first full-length album, prosaically titled “The Record,” the references come fast and furious, in song titles or random lines: the Beatles with “Revolution 0,” Sheryl Crow with “Not Strong Enough,” Virginia Woolf with “Letters to an Old Poet,” Joan Didion and the Cure with scattered borrowings or citations, and last but not least, Leonard Cohen with, um, “Leonard Cohen.”
These fleeting shout-outs come from bona fide super fans, with a sense of humor about culture and about themselves. But the funny thing is, when they’re not playing spot-the-reference, Bridgers, Dacus and Baker are making music so good that it doesn’t seem untoward to elevate them to the same big leagues as their heroes. Individually that’s already the case, with all three among the forefront of 20-something singer-songwriters. But it wasn’t always clear, until “The Record,” how there might be even a fourth sensibility they could bring to bear as a collective. It’d be an insult to these artists’ solo records to say that the whole of Boygenius is greater than the sum of its parts, but the new album feels like you could play it a hundred times and still enjoy decoding how their voices and personas diverge and recombine in ways that are distinctly separate and alchemistic at the same time.
