Forever Is a Feeling

On Lucy Dacus’ fourth album, she threatens to throw a fit if she can’t win her girl’s heart. She swears that if she doesn’t, she’ll lose her mind. She wants to feel her crush’s canines pierce her shoulder, have her hair yanked, be dragged feet-first into bed to give herself over fully. She feels alive when she’s behaving her worst. She wants to scream her beau’s name on the street until her throat is raw and infants recoil in terror. So why doesn’t she?

Forever Is a Feeling is, per a recent New Yorker profile, the Virginia songwriter’s account of coming to terms with her feelings for her Boygenius bandmate Julien Baker, from unsuccessful denial to ecstatic realization, and ending another relationship along the way. There are thighs grabbed under restaurant tables, a sensual bliss that is both tempered and enhanced by her mature perspective: “Nothing lasts forever but let’s see how far we get/So when it comes my turn to lose you I’ll have made the most of it,” as Dacus sings on “Lost Time.” It’s typical of the 29-year-old musician’s appealingly earnest wisdom, of lessons learned the hard way—yet the music here feels hamstrung by caution and daintiness, protecting infatuation in its gilded cage.

Take lead single “Ankles,” a fantasy about forbidden sex and overcoming shame: “How lucky are we to have so much to lose,” Dacus sings. But the song itself is courtly, the mildly suggestive groove and gasped intonation of the first verse giving way to a sparkly reverie that sounds made to soundtrack a queer-coded Netflix adaptation of a Regency novel. Her daydream concludes with thoughts of tea in the morning: “Ask me how did I…sleep,” Dacus sings, savoring a cutesy pause like the first sip. It’s briskly demure, lacking lust or carnality or even the guilty stomach flip of a properly obsessive crush you shouldn’t be entertaining; the title is apt insofar as it might scandalize a Victorian gentleman.

Marking her move from Matador to a major label, Forever Is a Feeling is Dacus’ sweetest and most sentimental-sounding album, all but extinguishing the bonfire crackle of her previous records. Love, naturally, is the fuzziest feeling, and even long-term singletons and serial monogamists aren’t immune to the charms of truly moon-eyed music: Listening should feel like having a surrogate crush. But the passion and obsession of Dacus’ lyrics are rarely mirrored in these benign mid-tempo devotionals. There are hot’n’heavy songs set under the covers, “legs all double-knotted in the morning at the Ritz,” but the saccharine instrumentation is more like a wet blanket. “Best Guess” is about putting all your money on red, gambling your future on changing bodies, changing minds. Its limpid guitar and keys shrug along pleasantly, making the song damn with faint praise. If I were someone’s best guess, I’d want more.

As you’d hope from such considered arrangements—with violinist Phoenix Rousiamanis taking a key role—there is real beauty here: “Limerence” skips upwards in anxious little piano whorls, its elegance contrasted with Dacus “shoveling popcorn into my mouth/So I don’t say the things that I’m thinking out loud.” Still, she croons it gorgeously; the song might work at weddings were it not about knowing you’re going to break someone’s heart. In fact, the darker songs are the more captivating ones: The grungy “Talk” reckons with the demise of that relationship, Dacus’ deadened voice weighed down by sour electric guitar, eventually blurred out by pummeling static. The lovely cowboy ballad “Bullseye” tenderly reflects on what the erstwhile couple had, and possesses the album’s best chorus—“You’re a bullseye and I aimed right/I’m a straight shot/You’re a grand prize,” Dacus and guest vocalist Hozier sing in a wistful canter—but he sells it harder, highlighting the blankness in her voice.

Dacus’ past albums revealed her as a singer capable of great richness, recrimination, and sarcasm. Here, her manuscript has been rendered lowercase: pirouetting prettily on “Come Out” when she sings, “I wanna scream from the bottom of my lungs”; starting many songs with something like a sigh. The ornate instrumentation isn’t far from Folklore, but Taylor Swift’s sharp voice made those songs stand to attention; here, songs about making a mess to live your truth still sound prim. The comparatively freewheeling guitar of “Most Wanted Man” (as in, “in West Tennessee”—Memphis native Baker) hits a surprising power-pop stride in its middle eight that sounds a lot like “I Should’ve Known,” the first track on Aimee Mann’s 1993 solo album Whatever—a reminder of the wryness and disappointment an artfully affectless voice can convey. It’s a thrill when “Modigliani” starts with Dacus close and direct, like the delightful “Modigliani melancholy got me long in the face,” referencing the Italian painter’s almond-faced figures.

Undersold as it is by the placid delivery, the writing is the best part of Forever Is a Feeling. Dacus sometimes lapses into simply saying what she sees, the curse of her generation of songwriters: “Why does it feel significant?/Why do I have to tell you about it?” she sings on “Modigliani,” desperate to text Baker every detail of her day, a thought that may occur when “Roddy’s playing GTA” on “Limerence,” or “the sky is gray” in “Lost Time.” And Dacus rolling her eyes at being stuck in “a boardroom full of old men guessing what the kids are into” on “Come Out” feels, at this point, like rote posturing—not least since sitting in boardrooms is probably part of the deal when you’re splitting royalties with Hozier. Otherwise, immediacy is her best gift. It’s hard not to feel gutted at the casually cruel reveal of “Big Deal” as hope blossoms and withers in a matter of seconds:

Flicking embers into daffodils
You didn’t plan to tell me how you feel
You laugh about it like it’s no big deal
Crush the fire underneath your heel

Later on, in “Most Wanted Man,” the moment gets an equally heart-in-mouth denouement, describing the force of Baker’s gaze as “almost vulgar and out of place/Like seeing the moon in the day.” Dacus’ gaze can be just as acute, cutting to the truth of what it is to know someone: “Yeah, you’re smart,” she sings on the title track, “but you’re dumb at heart,” loving praise for any nerd who walls up their goofy core with books. “For Keeps” exists in the same quietly transcendent register as the low-key country hymnals Dacus wrote for Boygenius’ The Record: “If the Devil’s in the details and God is everything/Who’s to say that they are not one and the same? … If the Devil’s in the details/Then God is in the gap in your teeth/You are doing the Lord’s work every time you smile at me.” It’s cute in a good way.

In Liz Pelly’s monumental book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Secretly Group cofounder Darius Van Armen talks about how the monetization of repeat plays forced the indie label business model to evolve from signing experimental bands like, say, Oneida, to music that would work in the background of coffee shops. It’s academic that Dacus was signed to Matador: Boygenius’ ascension to Interscope, and hers to Geffen, is the ultimate proof of that model. Indies have always fed majors, but there’s never seemed less air between indie and pop than there is now. The songs from Forever Is a Feeling would sit right alongside Gracie Abrams’ singles—or indeed Hozier’s—on a playlist, neither actively adventurous nor brazenly crowd-pleasing.

If there’s anything radical about Forever Is a Feeling, it’s the album’s expression of queer contentment. Dacus’ whole-body lunge toward what she wants, upending her life to close the distance between herself and desire, is a risk that her and Baker’s confirmed “committed relationship” proves is worth taking. Mainstream music has rarely been so overtly queer, but there still aren’t tons of high-profile records about happy endings—about the joyful domesticity of folding your girlfriend’s clothes while she sings “a song I showed you years ago” in the shower, as on closer “Lost Time.”

You could posit that it’s similarly radical to exalt these songs in such finery, much like the gown Dacus wears in Will St. John’s handpainted album artwork: a sort of musical Portrait of a Lady on Fire, all repressed, smoldering desire. But there’s no fire here, let alone soily hallucinogens smeared in armpits; if it’s glory in queer domesticity you want, Perfume Genius has long nailed it with rapture and ambiguity. The album’s tweeness is reminiscent of the cutesy (one could say unthreateningly desexualized) way lesbian culture has been commodified in the mainstream: The Dacus-directed video for “Best Guess,” populated with sweetly line-dancing mascs, butches, trans men, and Cara Delevingne, might be the moment’s Rosetta Stone. Forever Is a Feeling turns the most transcendent, hopeful, horny moments of a young lover’s life into maddeningly safe background music. It’s so frustrating, you could scream.

Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling

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