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 in March 2023 and I'm still not entirely sure what to do with it. It's one of the more fully realized artistic statements of the year — 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 in permanent conversation. Bridgers brings the observational precision, the willingness to land on a detail that's 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.
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, the way the chorus opens up, the specific quality of the self-deprecation, which is somehow both genuine and playful at once. But 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 doesn't have adequate language for.
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. Choosing to suspend solo momentum and invest in something collective is a genuine choice, and the risk isn't just commercial — it's the risk of artistic dilution, of the combined being lesser than the parts.
That didn't 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.
There's 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.
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's 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.
