boygenius spent a month at Shangri-La in Malibu making an album that begins with a question and ends with a farewell, and the twelve tracks between those two poles are arranged with a care that makes the whole thing feel less like a debut and more like a considered argument. Released March 31, 2023, on Interscope, *the record* arrived roughly five years after Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus had recorded their self-titled EP in four days at Sound City Studios in Van Nuys on the Matador label. The difference in approach is audible in every room the album moves through. This one had time to think.
The opener, "Without You Without Them," runs just over a minute and is a cappella: three voices, no instruments, written by Dacus and brought to the group for refinement. It lands somewhere between a hymn and an overture, which is exactly what it is. The question it poses, essentially "who would I be without you, without them," is the album's thesis, stated plainly before the band has even picked up a guitar. Then "$20" arrives, Baker's electric guitar kicking the door open, and the record announces that it intends to cover the full distance between those two registers. Baker had said after the EP that the band needed "more sick riffs," and "$20" is the evidence. Carla Azar, whose drumming on tracks three, four, and six gives the record some of its most physical moments, is present on "Emily I'm Sorry," "True Blue," and "Not Strong Enough," and those three together form the album's most electric stretch.
What makes *the record* a complete artistic statement rather than a collection of strong songs is the sequencing logic that runs underneath it. Side A is, broadly, about the difficulty of being known: "Cool About It" thanks Paul Simon in the liner notes for inspiration, and it earns the comparison in the way it holds irony and sincerity in the same hand, three voices navigating what it means to run into someone you once loved and perform composure. "Not Strong Enough" follows, and it is the album's most communal track, all three members writing and singing together. The flip side of the record then slows and turns inward. "Revolution 0" is a Bridgers-led ballad. "Leonard Cohen" quotes portions of Cohen's "Anthem," with HoJun Yu also credited as a co-writer, and runs under two minutes, a small pause at the center of the album. "Satanist" opens back up. "We're In Love" is the emotional core, Dacus plainly and calmly stating a feeling that the rest of the record has been circling.
The production, co-produced by Catherine Marks alongside the band, with additional contributions from Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Melina Duterte, and Sarah Tudzin, is worth noting for what it does not do. It does not iron the three voices into a unified texture. Rob Moose's string arrangements, Anna Butterss on bass, Barbara Gruska and Marshall Vore adding percussion and color: these are players who know how to serve a song rather than fill it. Mike Mogis, who mixed the record, has a long history of understanding how to keep folk-adjacent music from becoming airless, and the album breathes throughout. The sessions at Sound City in Van Nuys, where additional recording took place, add nothing audibly different from the Malibu material, which is a kind of compliment: the record sounds like one room even when it wasn't.
"Anti-Curse," second to last, is a Baker track in the most recognizable sense, existential and building toward a climax that earns its drama. And then "Letter to an Old Poet" closes the album, a farewell to a relationship that no longer serves the speaker, which rhymes quietly with the opener's celebration of the relationships that do. The album begins by asking who we would be without the people who shaped us, and it ends by letting one of those people go. That is a full arc.
The fact that it is delivered across twelve tracks in forty-two minutes, by three people who each wrote independently and then handed their work to the other two for refinement, makes the coherence feel even more earned. The album debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 and number one on the UK Albums Chart, also topping Billboard's Vinyl Albums chart, where vinyl accounted for sixty-seven percent of its first-week units. Six Grammy nominations followed. None of that is incidental. It reflects something the numbers rarely capture: the structural intelligence at work. The three of them did not just blend. They built something with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and they knew what each part was for.
