Boygenius’ ‘The Record’ Finds an Ideal Blend of Stark Individuality and Supergroup Charm: Album Review
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The three women of Boygenius — Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker — have made alluding to their forebears a hallmark of their band.
Witness the cover of their first EP in 2018, when they re-created the casual iconography of the debut album sleeve of a prior supergroup — Crosby, Stills & Nash — or when they posed as Nirvana on a recent Rolling Stone cover.
On their first full-length album, prosaically titled “The Record,” the references come fast and furious, in song titles or random lines: the Beatles with “Revolution 0,” Sheryl Crow with “Not Strong Enough,” Virginia Woolf with “Letters to an Old Poet,” Joan Didion and the Cure with scattered borrowings or citations, and last but not least, Leonard Cohen with, um, “Leonard Cohen.” These fleeting shout-outs come from bona fide super fans, with a sense of humor about culture and about themselves.
But the funny thing is, when they’re not playing spot-the-reference, Bridgers, Dacus and Baker are making music so good that it doesn’t seem untoward to elevate them to the same big leagues as their heroes.
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