‘boygenius’ Review: A home for the eternally homesick
Tags: Music, Music Review, Boygenius, Album Review, Album

Out of all the complaints one could possibly have about an album, “too short” is probably the most flattering one for an artist. boygenius, the first EP from the trio of the same name, is an insight into the deepest parts of three anxious young minds who are as often eerily similar than vastly different. One could expect to come out exhausted of such an honest pouring out of emotions; surprisingly, the end result ends up being quite at odds from that first impression. Each song is so painfully sincere, so agile in walking right on that fine line between the extremely personal and the universally relatable that we have no choice but to beg for more. If tears are shed over the course of the album, they will not be ones of sadness but of pure catharsis. It is almost a small miracle in its own right — how can six short songs so perfectly fit the hole in its listener’s heart ?

Boygenius as a band started out on tour, bringing together the already established talents of Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. boygenius as an EP was written and recorded over the course of four days. It seems that this project is characterized by ephemerality in more ways than one. The three singers harmonize: ‘I am never anywhere / Anywhere I go / When I’m home I’m never there / Long enough to know’ over the acoustic guitar of “Ketchum, ID”. The EP miraculously captures the “somewhere” that doesn’t exist for them. This is a collection of feelings that were never meant to be explored, too vague, too fleeting to truly know we’re feeling them before they’re gone. Putting words on things that have been left unsaid for so long almost feels dangerous. The slow rhythms, soft acoustic strings and understated vocal performances clash with a sense of emergency from the listener’s part. This feels like a one in a lifetime chance, and the knowledge it will end soon is already devastating. The replay button has rarely felt so life changing.

This unconventional attitude towards the album also relates to one of its main motifs quite perfectly: the strange feeling that is being deeply wounded right where it hurts the most and yet never wanting it to stop, or only when it gets so overwhelming that you feel like your life might be in danger. Bridgers expertly summarizes this contradictory sensation in her verse in “Souvenir”: ‘Always managed to move in / Right next to cemeteries / And never far from a hospital / I don’t know what that tells you about me’. There’s just enough hope shining through these words to make us stick throughout the entire EP, a faint promise of healing that we never quite get to fully embrace.

If one was not aware that boygenius was born out of three previously separate acts, it wouldn’t be outlandish to think that we are listening to a band that has been playing together for years. Musically, the three voices melt into each other effortlessly, the respective styles of its members blending into a new yet oddly familiar one. The only thing giving us a hint towards the outside context of the band are the themes they choose to explore. “Bite the Hand”, the album’s opening song, is a bitter look at the odd relationship between the artist and the fan, the constant struggle between the artist’s real self and the person their fans want them to be, the fight between the very concentrated love a fan feels for a specific artist and the diluted love the artist feels for what often feels like an indistinct mass. The EP is all about illusions, fragilities, ambiguities. No matter how much heart the three singers seem to put in their songs, the very first minutes of the record warn us immediately: you may know their songs, and they’re thankful that they mean this much to you — but if you think that means you know them, you are sorely mistaken.

“Me & My Dog” follows on the first song’s footsteps by indirectly addressing a panic attack that Bridgers had at one of her shows, once again making something uniquely relatable out of a very individual experience. The theme emerges again in the album’s forementioned closing song “Ketchum, ID”, a melancholic ballad about being on the road and longing for a place to call home. The brilliance of these songs lies in their unexpected universality. This is not an album by acclaimed musicians for other acclaimed musicians with similar tour experiences. This is for anyone who has ever felt anxious, lonely, insecure, too much, not enough, or all of these at once.

The other half of the EP leans into more general concerns, often addressing an unnamed, possibly antagonistic ‘you’. ‘When you cut a hole into my skull / Do you hate what you see?’ asks Dacus on “Souvenir”, shortly followed by all three of them asking ‘Would you teach me I’m the villain’ on “Stay Down”. This ‘you’ could be anyone and anything: some suggested God, others an abusive partner. Searching to establish a fixed identity of this figure is ultimately meaningless, for everyone will relate to it in a different way. This establishment of the ‘you’ as a draining, all consuming entity gets reinforced in the album’s penultimate song “Salt in the Wound”. This song represents the peak in the album, both in its poetic lyrics and its increasingly intense vocal performances and instruments. ‘If this is a prison I’m willing to buy my own chain’, Bridgers almost yells out at the end of the second verse. Every new word, every accusation towards this hurting yet apathetic figure feels like both a release and a progressively tighter chokehold. We don’t want it to be over, but by the time the voices fade out, we’re happy to breathe again.

With a supergroup such as this one, one could worry about a specific member taking the lead over another, or conversely about another member getting left out. While some of the songs are more distinctly led by either Baker, Bridgers or Dacus, the overall EP maintains a solid balance between all of them. In the end, the EP is indeed about balance more than anything else: the balance between light and dark, joy and sadness, love and hate. It is an EP that never promised what it ends up giving, which makes this gift all the more special. We might be concerned about the uncertainty of a follow up considering the transient nature of the project, but it would be unfair to discredit everything the album gave us simply because of our own selfishness. For now, the only thing left to do is to be thankful for the beautifully fucked up home boygenius gave us, if only for a moment.