The Record＜限定盤/Blue Vinyl＞

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. Whats remarkable about The Record is how these three idiosyncratic songwriters consciously decide to subsume their quirks within a group voice. Individual traits havent been erased so much as theyve 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 thats 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: its bracing to hear such introspective singer/songwriters embrace the pleasures of a united front. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine