Often, supergroups can feel like a bit of a pointless endeavour; perfectly listenable, but with the nagging feeling it’s not quite as good as the individual sum of its parts. Not so with Boygenius. Though Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus â three singer-songwriter types who are often compared; presumably because they’re all ‘women who play guitar and sing about their feelings’ â all have their own distinct voices, their talents mesh together in this band to create something incredibly special. Gravitating together while each of their solo careers were on the rise, all three members are brilliantly obsessed with one another, and songs like Without You Without Them and We’re In Love unpick their mutual creative infatuation.
Earlier this year, the Boys cemented their place on the indie-rock scene with debut The Record, and just seven months later they’re back with the equally matter-of fact EP The Rest. As the title implies, these are the leftovers which ended up on the cutting room floor.
Epic opener Black Hole feels like the moment that brushes closest to the most powerful moments of their debut, building from urgent piano to looming darkness in a manner that recalls Bridgers’ solo track I Know The End. Elsewhere though, the spotlight is passed between members, with each getting their own moment.
Afraid of Heights is deceptively simple beneath its quiet guitar strums, and its storytelling is a lyrical highlight of the EP. Helmed by Lucy Dacus, it watches on with fear, and a brief flicker of envy, as somebody far more reckless scales building site cranes, lights fires, and dives off jagged cliffs into inky black oceans. Though Dacus’ protagonist isn’t cut out for taking those kinds of risks, she’s brave in a different way; she dares to be hopeful about the future even while the present feels bleak. She holds onto the rarity of being able to choose “a life that isn’t dangerous”. Elsewhere, she sings :”I wanna live a vibrant life, but I wanna die a boring death.”
Her sentiment reminds me of a powerful passage from Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, in which game developer Sam talks about dying the kind of peaceful, ordinary death that would never have a hope of making it into a blockbuster shooter. A non-video game death, he argues â similarly to the mundane death Dacus hopes for in some distant day â is a gift to be cherished.
The Julien Baker-led closer The Power â a spare, grunge-influenced track, which later drifts away in a warm peal of mournful brass â transforms the feeling of being an outsider into a supervillain origin story. “How did it start?” she asks. “Did I fall into a nuclear reactor? And crawl out with acid skin or something worse. A hostile alien ambassador?”
Though Voyager is led by Phoebe Bridgers, her bandmates back her up with an old-timey hum. Overlapping with the themes of Bridgers’ verse on debut album song Cool About It, the self-referential Voyager nods to a lyric from Jack At The Asylum â a song Bridgers used to cover in side-project Better Oblivion Community Center with Conor Oberst â and evokes a desire to read a distant partner’s mind.
As you might expect from a release of debut offcuts, The Rest feels less cohesive than The Record, and rather than a love letter to accidentally stumbling on creative alchemy, Dacus, Baker and Bridgers all get their own moments in the spotlight. Though it’s not going to upset any apple carts, it makes for the perfect debut companion piece.
