Just Don't Call Them a Supergroup

Three solo records later, boygenius gets the band back together.

- CRAIG JENKINS

WHAT STEADIES YOU when you’re spiraling? Who talks you out of your worst ideas and into your best ones? Boygenius is a rock band and a writers’ workshop and a place of peace for Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus, singer-songwriters whose music hides devastating emotional candor behind enticing hooks. The trio met while gigging in the mid-2010s and kept in touch, getting along swimmingly because they were circling some of the same concepts from different approaches. Bridgers’s 2017 debut, Stranger in the Alps, situated her in the Elliott Smith school of double-tracked vocals and harrowing honesty. A month later, Baker released her sophomore effort, Turn Out the Lights, balancing moonlit soul-searching and elegant, understated electric-guitar lines. The following March, Dacus’s Historian paired observations about emotional dependency and looming crises of faith with ornate rock grooves.