The steadfast devotion between the women of Boygenius is a subject worthy of a dog-eared literary classic, one that’s passed from friend to friend until the pages come fluttering off the spine. In 2016, Julien Baker spotted Lucy Dacus reading Henry James in the green room of a venue and felt an immediate affinity; the two became friends and developed mutual, unspoken crushes as they wrote each other lengthy correspondences online. A month later, a similar kinship transpired between Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, who traded favorite authors and poets in their own email thread. They were three young singer-songwriters of shrewd sensitivity, tentatively navigating early-career acclaim; “Things were happening for us all at the same time and I think we’ve gravitated to each other,” Baker has said. Cut to 2018, when they got booked together on a triple bill and headed into the studio, thinking they’d record one song. They emerged with six. By all accounts, making that initial Boygenius EP was an ineffable experience, the consequence of which should not be diminished through careless simile: “It was not like falling in love,” Bridgers states. “It was falling in love.”
It’s not just that Boygenius poke fun at the degree to which male artists are lionized—in the EP artwork imitating Crosby, Stills, & Nash; their recent recreation of Nirvana’s 1994 Rolling Stone cover; and the new album’s working title contenders like In Rainbows and The White Album. It’s not just that their commitment to making music together pushes against the competitive forces of patriarchy, in the same spirit as women-led supergroups from Wild Flag to the Highwomen. It is that the three women seem to actually love each other, as expressed on their long-awaited debut album, ultimately titled The Record. It’s a kind of love that rejects the ingrained impulse for women to route their emotional, spiritual, and erotic attention away from their peers and toward men—what the feminist poet Adrienne Rich diagnosed in a famous essay—but also troubles the commonly accepted division between romance and friendship. Boygenius are teammates, confidantes, soon-to-be onstage make-out partners; the songs on The Record are largely for each other, about each other, littered with inside references.
This time, Dacus, Bridgers, and Baker bring in the best guys in the business: Jay Som’s Melina Duterte on bass, Autolux’s Carla Azar on drums, Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin as engineer, and Catherine Marks on co-production. The Pulitzer-nominated novelist Elif Batuman wrote the introductory essay; Oscar-nominated actress Kristen Stewart directed three Boygenius music videos. Boygenius embrace how we are always responding to and being formed by others, and how this porousness can enrich our lives. As they wonder on the album’s opener, in braided unison: “Who would I be without you, without them?”