All alone

Songwriters step away from their bands with tales of love lost and found.

- BY GRAHAM REID

Alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker, the inventive Lucy Dacus is one of the women in the Grammy-winning band boygenius.

With that informal group on a hiatus, Dacus again steps out under her own name for a tasteful, thoughtful and sometimes provocative alt-rock set that comes with romantic strings attached, and assistance from singer-songwriters Hozier and Blake Mills, as well as her boygenius pals.

After a brief introduction from treble-forward strings, we're swept into the shuffling folk and lyrical intensity of Big Deal, where Dacus sounds convincingly worn down by the end of a relationship (“everything comes up to the surface in the end, even the things we've not even spoken ...”), the more assertive and sensual heat of Ankles (“pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed... I'm not going to stop you this time”) and the swooning piano ballad