Ahead of her live performance this summer in Kingston, we listened to the Boygenius musician’s latest solo record.
After three years since her last performance in Kingston, Lucy Dacus returns following the release of her new album, Forever is a Feeling.
Last year proved to be hugely successful year for Dacus and her band, Boygenius, the American indie-rock super-group featuring Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker alongside the songwriter, vocalist and guitarist, with them winning two Grammys.
This year marks Dacus’s solo return, after her last album Home Video in 2021.
Forever Is A Feeling shows a beautiful continuation from Home Video, and from Boygenius’s last album The Record. It showcases her ability to use a combination of rock and folk to encapsulate and replicate the emotions within the multifaceted and complicated nature of love.
Produced by Blake Mills, along with Dacus and a wider team, the album shows similarities to Mills’s own music, blending a comforting fusion of a low melancholic voice with a beautiful variation of textures within instruments.
The album also includes contributions from Boygenius bandmate Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker, Bartees Strange, Madison Cunningham and Melina Duterte.
More specifically, Boygenius fans will be sure to delight in more music that shows the innocent and euphoric yet painful feeling that yearning holds, as well as the exploration and representation of queer love.
When speaking on the theme and name of the album, Dacus said: “Falling in love, falling out of love. You can’t actually capture forever. But I think we feel forever in moments”.
The lyricism throughout the album, with an array of metaphors in relation to small moments and characteristics of a relationship, exhibit how minor concepts all contribute to the overall immersion of love and how it dictates your life.
It begins with Calliope Prelude, an instrumental composed of haunting orchestral sounds, which combines sentiments of melancholy and reflection, setting a precedent for the rest of the album.
The theme is also very much evident within tracks such as Big Deal, Limerence and Forever Is A Feeling, all commenting on the ways in which longing assumes control over your life and thoughts.
Hozier, the multi-award-winning Irish artist, is featured on the track Bullseye, a beautiful blend of his folky sound and Dacus’s sense of euphoria.
The album closes with the track Lost Time, beginning with a beautiful ambience of birdsong, and later forms into a powerful accumulation of rock and blissful pop, acting almost as a representation of how quiet reflection can grow into a multitude of dynamic emotions.
Overall, once again Dacus has displayed how she continually manages to excel in her signature style of a display of the ethereal aspects of emotion within a range of genres.
The album is now available to listen on all music providers, and you can purchase tickets to Dacus’s 9 June show at Kingston Przym here.
