A streak of conspiratorial glee runs through “The Record,” the full-length debut album by boygenius. “It’s a bad idea and I’m all about it,” Julien Baker announces in “$20,” the album’s brashest rocker, which leaps around with hard-strummed, odd-meter guitar riffs. Baker goes on to boast, “In another life we were arsonists.”
Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus made an EP together as boygenius in 2018, then returned to their own ascending solo careers. At Bridgers’s instigation, they regrouped to record a full album in January 2022; it’s being released on Friday. Even in the quietest, most self-questioning songs on “The Record,” boygenius sounds like its members are egging on one another, cheering the boldest moves and pushing past collaboration toward synergy.
The three songwriters found one another as they crossed paths on the indie-rock circuit in the 2010s. They had developed kindred styles on their solo albums, absorbing lapidary Laurel Canyon folk-pop, punky electric-guitar drive, glimmers of electronics and psychedelia, and lyrics that mix confession and fantasy, the diaristic and the surreal.
On “The Record” — produced by boygenius with collaborators including Catherine Marks, Sarah Tudzin (of Illuminati Hotties) and Melina Duterte (a.k.a. Jay Som) — the arrangements encompass bare-bones acoustic backdrops and intricate studio confections, often dissolving between them in the same song.The new album is (to borrow the title of a Paul Simon compilation) a collection of negotiations and love songs. Its 12 tracks cherish relationships but constantly interrogate them: romances, friendships, family ties and musical bonds. Baker, Bridgers and Dacus take turns singing lead vocals and join in harmonies, savoring and then subsuming their differences.
“The Record” begins the way the “boygenius” EP ended: a cappella, just three voices sharing major chords like a family singing a hymn. The song, “Without You Without Them,” is a request coupled with a promise, and it could describe their musical alliance as well as a prospective liaison: “Give me everything you’ve got/I’ll take what I can get.”
The years between boygenius recordings have made all three songwriters more confident and more levelheaded. The songs on “boygenius” were filled with thoughts of self-doubt and pained separations. The chorus of its opening song, “Bite the Hand,” was “I can’t love you how you want me to.”
But on the new album, the group treats contention as a fact of life: serious, even heartbreaking, but not the end of the story. In the folky, fingerpicked “Cool About It,” each member sings a verse about running into an ex, feeling the wounds but moving on: “Telling you it’s nice to see how good you’re doing/even though we know it isn’t true.”
Often, conflict is a route to deeper understanding. “You already hurt my feelings three times in the way only you could,” Dacus sings in the billowing “True Blue.” Then she immediately adds, “But it feels good to be known so well/I can’t hide from you like I hide from myself.”
In “Not Strong Enough” the pumping, echoing production summons the new wave 1980s; one verse mentions singing the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” The trio describes a shaky relationship, with a nod to a Sheryl Crow song: “I am not strong enough to be your man/I lied, I am, just lowering your expectations.” But the music is sure of itself, with insistent drums, steady-strummed guitars and countermelodies from the bass, and it carries boygenius toward a theological refrain: “Always an angel, never a god.”
In both sonics and words, boygenius looks back to something that has changed — for the worse — between the analog and digital eras. Let’s call it quantifiability: the reduction of lived experience to coldly impersonal numbers. Offline, there’s still a lingering humanity in the untabulated, non-replicable, just plain messy circumstances of everyday physicality and spiritual connection — something that music can still capture, even when it’s played back from a computer. And boygenius knows it’s still accessible.
The songs on “The Record” make ambiguity and ambivalence sound sensible, even intimate. “Emily I’m Sorry” features Bridgers, her voice breathy and anxiously apologetic, as the track morphs from low acoustic strumming to pulsating, programmed, flipped-backward sounds. “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am,” Bridgers sings, “But I know what I want.”
The album’s finale, “Letter to an Old Poet,” also has Bridgers up front. It places plain piano chords in an electronic limbo, joined by swooping strings, as the singer tries to break away from someone she loves who’s charismatic but evil. “You make me feel like an equal,” she sings, “but I’m better than you and you should know that by now.” The song grapples, craftily and intensely, with the distance between passion and logic, between feelings and measurements. Three indie-rock songwriters may not be able to bridge that separation, but they’re trying.
