Lucy Dacus – Forever Is A Feeling (Geffen)
Lucy Dacus has never been one to shout. Over the course of her three previous albums, No Burden, Historian, and Home Video, she has mastered a quiet, clear-eyed form of storytelling, drawn from memories, contradictions, and restrained revelations.
While her collaborators in boygenius, Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, often deal in distortion, spectral production, or spiritual collapse, Dacus is wry, rational, and powerfully grounded. She is the one who watches, listens, and remembers. With Forever Is a Feeling, her first major-label release (on Geffen), she gives us her most lush, intimate, and classically styled collection yet.
It’s also her most personal. As announced in the weeks leading up to the album’s release, Dacus is now in a relationship with Julien Baker, and that permeates these songs. These are love songs, but not just about the upside, they are also about surrender, honesty, emotional risk, and the private language and rituals built by couples.
With Blake Mills on production, the sonic palette is warmer, softer, more classical, incorporating strings, mellotron, pedal steel, even harp. The sound of someone opening their thoughts and feelings all the way, but doing so quietly.
The album opens with Calliope Prelude, a minute long instrumental of airy strings that sets the tone perfectly. Named after the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry, it prepares us for an album that is emotionally epic in scope, but miniature in detail. Big Deal follows, a soft and circling track about the irrationality of falling in and out of love. Over strummed acoustic guitar and rising strings, Dacus sings, “Maybe everything can stay the same,” with a clarity that feels almost daring. Her voice is calm and explanatory, as if reassuring herself through the swell of emotional change.
The tension between desire and domesticity plays out strikingly in Ankles, which begins with cello and layered strings before slipping into a beat that verges on danceable. Lyrically it explores sexual power, fantasy, and daily intimacy: “Pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed … Then help me with the crossword in the morning.” This playing with contrasts and connections between body and mind, and boldness and quiet knowing, recurs throughout the album.
Songs like Limerence and Talk take us deeper into Dacus’ emotional interior. Limerence is spare and orchestral, driven by piano and violin, built around questions of emotional control and self-sabotage. “Why do I feel alive when I’m behaving my worst?” she whispers. In Talk, arguably the album’s emotional centrepiece, she focuses on the disintegration of communication. “Why can’t we talk anymore? We used to talk for hours,” she sings, and you can feel the ache of that silence in the way the drums pull back and strings swell.
The sense of intimacy and quiet resolve deepens in For Keeps, “I don’t believe in anything anymore except you and me.” It’s the plainspoken, devastating, and oddly comforting lyric that Dacus excels at.
Best Guess is the album’s most overt love song, and also one of the lightest, musically speaking. “If I were a gambling man, and I am / You’d be my best bet,” she sings over tambourine, mellotron, and shuffling percussion. There is something held back in her delivery, a caution inside the joy.
That tension carries into Most Wanted Man, a song that adds electric guitars and heavier drums, as Dacus almost rocks out. It is a swaggering moment, and with lyrics that insist on the importance of the relationship, “Anything you give me will be something I will keep” it balances the hesitation of Best Guess with full commitment.
The title track, Forever Is a Feeling, builds in strength, moving from whispered vocals to a more strident finish, joined by Baker and Bridgers on backing vocals. The title line lands as a promise, and while Dacus doesn’t insist that love will last forever, she suggests that when it is present, it has the quality of eternity.
As a whole, Forever Is a Feeling feels like a very personal gift offered with heart and head. It doesn’t demand attention, but once caught, it holds your gaze . With this release, Lucy Dacus makes a gentle shift from indie darling to major-label artist. It may be a holding album in some ways, but it shows an artist in full command of her voice, opening her heart more fully and in doing so, she brings her listeners closer too.
John Bradbury
Forever Is A Feeling is released Friday, March 28th on Geffen Records
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