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The Record by Boygenius [Tri-Fold Jacket] [CD] Track Listing: 1 Without You Without Them2 $203 Emily I’m Sorry4 True Blue5 Cool About It6 Not Strong Enough7 Revolution 08 Leonard Cohen9 Satanist10 We’re In Love11 Anti-Curse12 Letter To An Old Poet2023 release, the debut album by the indie rock supergroup featuring Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus. The album was written and recorded at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. — Five years is a long time, long enough for a band to wander, reunite, and find themselves on a different plane. Such is the case of boygenius, the indie supergroup of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. When the trio first joined forces in 2018, it was to bash out an EP over the course of four days, releasing the results on Matador. Everything about The Record, the full-length debut delivered a half-decade later, is more deliberate. Boygenius spent a month cutting The Record, releasing it on Interscope to great fanfare in March 2023. The leap to the majors certainly reflects how the profiles of Dacus, Baker, and especially Bridgers have been elevated since the boygenius EP, a rise aided by each of the three releasing strong, distinctive albums in its wake. What’s remarkable about The Record is how these three idiosyncratic songwriters consciously decide to subsume their quirks within a group voice. Individual traits haven’t been erased so much as they’ve been sanded so they can fit neatly together. The unified front gives The Record shape and heft, qualities apparent from its twin openers: «Without You Without Them» highlights their spectral harmonies, while «$20» drives home an offset riff that’s quintessentially 1990s. Much of The Record feels like a conscious throwback to the spirit of 1993, blending the dreamier and noisier aspects of alt-rock, feeling equally at home with the bittersweet strums of «Leonard Cohen» and the walloping hooks of «Satanist,» not to mention how «True Blue» and «Not Strong Enough» land squarely in the middle of this spectrum. Collectively, boygenius feels heftier and hookier than Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus do on their own, and this collective instinct towards immediacy pays great dividends: it’s bracing to hear such introspective singer/songwriters embrace the pleasures of a united front. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, AllMusic Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE