Best albums of 2023: #25

 #25: boygenius, ‘The Record’

Genre: Indie Rock









The indie collective boygenius came onto the scene in 2018, with an excellent, focused debut EP. Consisting of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker, three of the genre’s most popular artists, this group’s existence was going to turn heads no matter the quality of the music they put out. 


The good news with this album is that it keeps nearly all the strengths of their original EP. On the best parts of The Record, it holds the same amount of emotional weight and musical skill. Its strongest aspect is definitely the lyrics, which tell tales presumably from the lives of the band members. Everything is delivered at a comfortable pace which allows you the space to bask in an emotion or follow a story very easily. For example, one of the major highlights on the album, Emily I’m Sorry, sets up its premise well with the title and lets you take in every little detail of the speaker’s relationship with Emily. Little touches like “We’re coming back from where no one lives/pretty much just veterans” or “Just take me back to Montreal/I’ll get a real job, you’ll go back to school” add a layer of authenticity to the apologetic tone. The song escalates and becomes more desperate as it goes on, beginning with a quiet drive home and ending with the speaker begging Emily to give her another chance. It all comes together to create a wonderful, emotionally moving song.


One of my personal favorite things about this album is its lyrical theme of uncertainty. While it might be easy from a songwriting perspective to simplify things by creating a beginning, middle, and end to every story, boygenius basks in life’s unsolvable problems. In the song 20$, a voice shouting in the background laments, “Wait on me, I’m not ready/I still have to change.” Cool About It ends before the band can confess their feelings to the other person mentioned in the song. We never hear if the apology in Emily I’m Sorry is accepted. It gives the album a sense of lingering lack of finality, as if the story is still being told.


While the lyrics certainly give the album personality and authenticity, without music it would just be slam poetry. For a good portion of the album the instrumentation is solid, however, it suffers from one too many songs that are uninteresting musically and end up feeling like filler. At times I longed for the focused and engaging EP. Songs like Leonard Cohen, Revolution 0 and We’re in Love don’t provide any real lasting impression lyrically or sonically. Without You Without Them gets a bit of a pass for being the album’s intro, but that makes 4 songs which is ⅓ of the album. If a third of your album is filler, the rest of it better be pretty damn good. 


Fortunately, the rest of this album has quite a few instrumental highlights. The drums on True Blue in particular sound excellent, and give the song a great sense of momentum which pays off well in its chorus. Satanist’s striking, heavy guitar fits well in contrast to the rest of the album, especially considering its subject matter. Anti-Curse, if a bit formulaic, successfully gives us an effective buildup to an energetic middle section.


However, the crown jewel of this album has to be Not Strong Enough. The album’s instrumentation and lyricism both peak in quality at the same time in this song. The guitars are light and easy to move along to, and the chorus is incredibly catchy. The lyrics express a feeling of inadequacy in life, the feeling that you’re almost good enough but not quite. The diversity of the singers’ styles plays into this song well, making it feel like they’re each expressing their own unique manifestation of this feeling. It’s easily the best song here. 


Despite the filler in this album, the consistency of the remaining songs is very impressive. With this album, boygenius shows not only that they can make a catchy and beautiful indie project, but that they have the potential to make an even better album in the future if they focus on their strengths. 



Favorite songs:

  1. Not Strong Enough

  2. Emily I’m Sorry

  3. Cool About It

Least favorite song: Revolution 0

Favorite moment: The chant of “always an angel, never a god” leading into the emotional final chorus of Not Strong Enough.

Favorite lyric: “I’m 27 and I don’t know who I am, but I know what I want,”


https://open.spotify.com/album/0e9GjrztzBw8oMC6n2CDeI

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