ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS BETTING ON THE FUTURE

Lucy Dacus after boygenius.

- BY AMANDA PETRUSICH

"Every idea that I had is happening, and kind of how I thought," Dacus said.

One morning in January, I met the musician Lucy Dacus at the Cloisters, the medieval-art museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River. Dacus is a formidable solo artist—since 2016, she has released three albums of searching, intimate folk rock—but she’s perhaps best known as one-third of the indie supergroup boygenius, alongside Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. Although boygenius formed in 2018, and put out an eponymous EP that year, the release of its début full-length, “The Record,” in 2023, was a seismic event: it garnered seven Grammy nominations and three wins, and earned the band a slot on a Timothée Chalamet-hosted episode of “Saturday Night Live,” a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, and a Rolling Stone cover mimicking a portrait of Nirvana, in which the boys, as they are known, appear wearing Gucci power suits and wide ties, arms defensively crossed. For Americans exhausted by the long tail of the first Trump Presidency, with its suffocating ideas about identity (all three members of boygenius are queer), the band became a kind of generational loadstone, a flash of hope in an era defined by catastrophic backsliding. The boys made out onstage, ripped their shirts open, covered Shania Twain, so-loed, dressed as the Holy Trinity, freebled, and leaped into one another’s arms. The band offered a new and liberating portrayal of female friendship, along with a lesson in liberation more generally.