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Mar 27, 2025 Web Exclusive By Caleb Campbell

Memory is one of the constant themes in Lucy Dacus’ work. Her sophomore album framed her as the titular historian, a chronicler of lives and stories in song. Similarly, 2021’s Home Video zoomed in close to Dacus’ childhood, with each song playing out as a touching vignette of Dacus’ formative years. Though the memories of these moments fracture, Dacus immortalizes them in her songs. Her latest album, Forever Is a Feeling once again deepens these connections. She treats each of the album’s songs like snow globes, capturing a moment and a feeling frozen forever in glassy resin.

The album arrives not long after Dacus and her boygenius bandmates made the jump from promising indie singer/songwriters to widely-celebrated Grammy-winning artists. It also is Dacus’ first release on a major label and finds her teaming up with a wider cadre of collaborators than ever before. Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers show up, as expected, but so do Bartees Strange, Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, and Hozier. It is perhaps not that surprising that Dacus was the first of the boygenius trio to make the jump to a major. If one thing sets Dacus apart from her bandmates, she very well might be the best pop songwriter of the group. Though she often encases her melodies in wispy folk instrumentation and serene harmonies, Dacus’ songcraft is effortlessly warm and luminous. Forever Is a Feeling is the culmination in the drift away from indie rock she has made since Historian, offering a record full of gleaming pop gems with the tender touch of a plaintive singer/songwriter.

From the beginning, Forever Is a Feeling suggests opulence, opening on a carefully textured baroque string introduction. The album quickly settles into familiar territory with “Big Deal,” the latest offering in Dacus’ catalog of aching paeans to doomed romance. She dresses her wistful acoustic chords with understated swells of strings and synths, allowing her vocal lines to bloom against a background of simple and evocative harmonies. Musically, it feels like the Platonic ideal of Dacus’ pop moment, while lyrically it finds her offering a final word to a friend and loved one, assuring them of their importance in her life: “When we both know that it would never work / You’ve got your girl, you’re gonna marry her / And I’ll be watching in a pinstripe suit / Not even wishing it was me and you…But if we never talk about it again / There’s something I want you to understand / You’re a big deal.”

The album’s aesthetics are similarly familiar, but they now come dressed up in a lush new packaging. Tasteful string tones color “Ankles” while the following track “Limerence” leans further into austere chamber folk, although these early singles seem to imply a turn into chamber pop that the album never fully takes. Instead, Dacus expands further on the tender acoustic pop she drew from on Home Video and boygenius’ the record, now wrapping her delicate vocal melodies in intimate production, delicate orchestral touches, and a layer of shimmering gloss. The gleaming chorus of the title track stands as likely the most straightforwardly pop of Dacus’ career, while “Modigliani” and “Come Out” adorn Dacus’ songwriting with beds of keys, harps, and strings. While much of the album lands in this comfortable middle space between Dacus’ indie roots and pop contemporaries, there are also moments of contrast. “For Keeps” strips things down to a spare and sparse folk confessional and “Talk” layers on the distortion with marching guitars and massive, rumbling drums.

In the past, Dacus’ songwriting has felt powerful because her songs feel so deeply personal and lived-in. Tracks like “Night Shift” or “Thumbs” make you viscerally inhabit Dacus’ heartache and fury. Her songwriting on Forever Is a Feeling feels more universal, if sometimes lighter on the finer details that have often colored her best work. For the first time, she comes across as less of a storyteller than a songwriter. This does blunt some of the jagged confessionalism of her music, even as it leaves more room for listeners to find themselves in the record’s moments of delight. Dacus has never sounded quite as loose and playful as she does on “Ankles” when she invites her love to “pull me by the ankles to the edge of the bed / And take me like you do in your dreams.”

Her songs once again place her feelings under a microscope, exploring all of the messy, contradictory shades of falling in and out of love, even as she reframes these confessions in a shared pop language. There are moments of heartache and yearning, ones that hit with as much weight as anything else in Dacus’ catalog. Tracks like “Talk” and “Limerence” explore a relationship’s slow fade, painting a portrait of the moments after you’ve realized heartbreak is inevitable: “I’m thinking about breaking your heart someday soon / And if I do, I’ll be breaking mine too…Towing the line of betraying your trust / Why do I feel alive when I’m behaving my worst?”

Yet, within these songs, heartbreak isn’t an end, just another turn love can take. The popular narrative goes that love can either end in a break-up or a happily ever after, but the truth is once you love someone you carry them with you forever. Dacus lives within these contradictions, singing on the title track, “This is bliss / This is hell / Forever is a feeling and I know it well.” Dacus is once again adept at describing the indescribable, putting words you’ve never had to feelings of bittersweet longing and loss that you know all too well. A track like “For Keeps” beautifully navigates this gray area: “We were not something / We were not nothing / We were in between things that made sense / But you wanted it / And I wanted it / And that’s the only thing that mattered in the end.”

Even though they are by far the most ubiquitous song topic in popular music, love songs can often ring somewhat false. Some of that is in the surety, the promises of undying devotion and neverending bliss. Like most former VBS kids, Dacus isn’t so sure about forever, what it could hold or even what it means. Forever Is a Feeling is an album about endings, some happy, some bittersweet, some devastating. Nonetheless, everything ends, even art and even music. Files degrade, memories fade, songs disappear from the Internet. Dacus seems to posit that the only eternity we are guaranteed is found in each other. Even though her songwriting reaches for shared, universal feelings, Forever Is a Feeling isn’t an attempt to live forever in the annals of pop stardom. Rather, Dacus takes up residence in the background of the moments of our lives. Within a few years of its release, there’s certain to be countless touching concert memories, aching daydreams, and tear-jerking wedding videos set to the record’s instant classic of a closer, “Lost Time.” That is the sort of forever Dacus aims for; an eternity contained in the joy of lives shared together. (www.lucydac.us)

Author rating: 7.5/10