If there is a better after-party to England losing the World Cup on Sunday morning than seeing Boygenius play to 25,000 fans, it’s hard to picture it. The US songwriting supergroup of Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus trade in both intimate commiserations and a celebration of female interdependence that runs counter to the concept of singular male brilliance that gave them their cheeky band name. They chose Irish songwriter Soak, US alt-pop star Ethel Cain and pop trio Muna to support them today: all queer artists, a bill reflected in a very polite crowd primarily comprised of girls, goths and gays (and England shirts). This spiritual sister to Lilith Fair feels like an apt conclusion to a summer defined by women succeeding on an epic scale, from the England squad to blockbuster, headline-dominating tours by Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and SZA, to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie painting the box office pink.
Gunnersbury Park is, Baker estimates, the trio’s biggest show ever, and there’s almost something incongruous about it: these three songwriters often sing in close-woven harmonies, and keep a similarly tight lyrical focus, from an imminent ex’s unbearable “keys on the counter, your dirty dish in the sink” in Dacus’s Please Stay, to Emily I’m Sorry, a Bridgers-led track about a crisis in the back seat of a car that seems to shudder with the precariousness of the situation. They have just one EP and an album, this year’s The Record, and many of their Americana-tinged songs proceed with a crushed, under-covers smallness, or a nostalgic dreaminess reminiscent of Sheryl Crow’s 90s hits. Yet the response among the crowd is one of abject hysteria – there are tattoos of Bridgers’ lyrics, and a woman wearing wings to cosplay as the lyric “always an angel, never a god” – reflecting a generational hunger to hear these small, never-ending embarrassments blown up sky-sized. One of the biggest yell-alongs comes in Emily I’m Sorry, as Bridgers sings, “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am.”
Boygenius are well aware of this, and take a knowing approach to their own iconography, perhaps having observed from Mitski’s gigs being overrun by screaming gen Z-ers that if you can’t beat ’em, you may as well join ’em. The merch features various well-done riffs on the classic heavy metal aesthetic. They walk on to The Boys Are Back in Town, adopt the verve of a wrestling announcer to introduce one another and, in their matching suits and ties, function a bit like a boyband. Bridgers, the most influential songwriter of the past five years, is obviously Robbie Williams and could presumably sell out the park alone, yet their formation is well balanced, highlighting each member’s strengths – the unblinking clarity of Dacus’s voice, the weather-worn innocence of Baker’s – without making their self-written songs sound like individual showcases, nor subsuming them to a blanded-out whole.
Balancing their heart-piercing lyrics are the self-consciously meme-able ones: Dacus’s “you say you’re a winter bitch but summer’s in your blood” from True Blue gets another scream-along, and Bridgers starts Boyfriends by asking the very LGBTQ-centric crowd: “Who here has a boyfriend?” After they boo, she says: “Who is a boyfriend? Who is an aspiring boyfriend?” to rising cheers, then the climax: “Who here is gay?” gets another scream. The hysteria becomes so much that the band keep having to stop the show to get security to attend to fainting fans: it’s not hot, nor exactly druggy, so you can only assume they’ve been overcome by pure swooning. The other price of this sort of extremely online fandom is the plague of phones, and before Letter to an Old Poet, Bridgers asks fans to put theirs away as it’s about “the hardest part of my adult life and I’d prefer to look you in the face”.
Sometimes the mid-tempo-ness of it all gets a bit overwhelming, though even when they play another wistful epic, it’s worth remembering how seldom women musicians have had the scope to be so expansive and in front of such vast crowds. But the highlights are undoubtedly the thrashers that make good on the gnarly merch imagery: $20 leaps from hymnal harmonies to a brawny crunch that thunders like river rapids; Satanist surges; Not Strong Enough turns a song about an inferiority complex into an all-time great chorus (one that would fit perfectly on the Cardigans’ underrated country-tinged Long Gone Before Daylight).
And the ending maxes out their self-sustained rock lore: Muna come on for Salt in the Wound, which climaxes with fireworks and Dacus snogging every member of her band as well as Muna. The six musicians tumble over each other, a giddy, gleeful pride that deserve to celebrate the special community they’ve created.
