What a Supergroup Should Be
The word supergroup implies a combining of existing fame, which suggests the primary transaction is the fan service of seeing beloved figures in the same room. This is usually what you get: an event that exists more as concept than as music, a promotional moment wearing an album's clothes. boygenius is the opposite of this. When Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus made their record, the logic ran entirely the other way: three writers who do very different things agreed to share a space and then made something that none of them could have made alone.
the record came out on March 31, 2023, through Interscope Records, and its twelve tracks constitute one of the more fully realized artistic statements of the year. It is a record that has a coherent emotional vision without being monolithic, that allows three distinct personalities to coexist without flattening them. The production is expansive: there are moments that sound like the space between stars and moments that sound like a basement in the best sense, intimate, slightly fuggy, concerned with the things you say when you're close enough to someone that you don't have to speak loudly.
Baker's contributions anchor things spiritually. Her faith and her doubt exist in permanent conversation throughout, and the tension between them generates heat rather than confusion. Bridgers brings the observational precision, the willingness to land on a detail so specific it achieves universality. Dacus brings something that I find hardest to name but most necessary: a kind of clear-eyed steadiness, a voice that has seen something clearly and survived the seeing.
The Twelve Tracks as a Unified Argument
The sequencing of the record rewards attention. It opens with 'Without You Without Them', a brief choral invocation that establishes the group's harmonic logic before any individual voice stakes a claim. This is a deliberate gesture. The album opens in community and never fully abandons that stance, even when the songs turn inward.
'$20' and 'Emily I'm Sorry' arrive early and position the record as one willing to sit with specific, uncomfortable feelings without resolving them tidily. '$20' has a looseness that belies its precision. 'Emily I'm Sorry' is one of the most controlled pieces of songwriting on the album, a confessional addressed to someone who may or may not be a real person, which is exactly the right kind of ambiguity.
'Cool About It' occupies a strange tonal middle ground between humor and devastation, and manages both without either undercutting the other. 'Revolution 0' and 'Leonard Cohen' sit in the album's interior and do important structural work, slowing the pace and deepening the emotional register before 'Satanist' and 'We're in Love' push things back toward sound and motion. The album closes with 'Anti-Curse' and 'Letter to an Old Poet', the latter functioning as a genuine farewell, the kind of closing track that feels earned rather than appended.
What Three Voices Do
Harmony is undervalued in contemporary music, partly because the technical requirements are high and partly because the vulnerability of proximity is uncomfortable. To harmonize with someone you have to be close enough to hear them, have to be willing to relinquish the solo for the chord, have to trust that the combined thing will be better than the separate parts.
The harmonies on the record are handled with a musical sophistication that rewards close listening. The voicings are not predictable. The three voices don't always occupy the expected registers. There are moments where Baker takes a lower part and Dacus something unexpected and Bridgers threads through the middle and the result is a sound that belongs to none of them individually.
'Not Strong Enough' became the most discussed track and deserves all the discussion. The Sheryl Crow reference in the opening line is both a signal and a small act of generosity toward a specific lineage of American songwriting. The way the chorus opens up, the specific quality of the self-deprecation, which is simultaneously genuine and playful: all of it lands. The song is structurally confident in a way that only happens when the people making it trust each other completely.
The album track that moves me most is 'True Blue', which is quieter and does something very precise with the image of friendship as a kind of love that the culture does not have adequate language for. The song names a feeling that most people have had and few have articulated. That is what the best songs do.
The Critical and Awards Record
The industry's response to the record was unusually unified. Perfect scores from DIY, NME, and Rolling Stone are individually meaningless and collectively significant, because those outlets rarely agree on anything. The record received seven Grammy nominations at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year. It won three, including Best Alternative Music Album.
Grammys are not a measure of artistic quality in any direct sense, but the nominations gesture toward the scale of the record's cultural footprint. An album this guitar-forward, this emotionally unguarded, this resistant to contemporary production trends, receiving that level of institutional recognition is genuinely surprising. The record did not compromise toward the mainstream. The mainstream moved toward it.
The Decision to Show Up
I keep thinking about the decision. All three of these people had their own careers, their own albums to make, their own audiences with expectations. boygenius had existed before, as a self-titled EP in 2018, which established the chemistry and then let it rest for five years. Choosing to return to it, to suspend solo momentum and invest in something collective again, is a genuine choice. The risk is not just commercial. It is the risk of artistic dilution, of the combined being lesser than the parts.
That did not happen. Something about the combination produced more than arithmetic would predict. The record they made together has a quality that none of their individual work quite achieves, not because the individual work is lesser but because this specific thing required all three of them. Baker alone is a particular kind of experience. Bridgers alone is a particular kind of experience. Dacus alone is a particular kind of experience. The three of them together are a fourth kind of experience that could not be derived from the other three.
There is something generous in the music, a generosity toward each other and toward the listener, a sense that the point is the song and not the profile. Nobody is trying to win. Nobody is using the record as a showcase. The songs ask to be listened to as songs, not as evidence of anyone's individual greatness.
That might be the strangest thing about this record. It sounds like people who actually meant it.
The record will outlast the moment. Not because it is transcendent in some vague sense but because the specific things it does, the specific harmonies, the specific ways the three voices find each other and then diverge, the specific emotional intelligence of the writing, are worth returning to repeatedly and rewarding repeated returns.
Three people decided to show up fully. The music they made from that decision is here. I keep coming back to it. I expect I will for a long time.
