Boygenius is the next leading trio in the music industry.
The group consists of three well-known indie artists: Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker. As a trio, the group released their first EP, boygenius, in 2018. After an agonizing five-year gap for fans, they released their first full album in early 2023, the record.
Following the success of the record, boygenius released another EP, the rest, on Oct. 13.
The EP cover—featuring the three artists silhouetted on a nighttime beach setting—is similar to their early 2023 album’s artwork. Both show the artists on a blue background; however, on the record, only their hands are shown reaching up toward the sky instead of the full-body image in the more recent work.
Starting from their album artwork, boygenius successfully attaches their four new songs to their previous album but establishes enough variability to differentiate them.
“Black Hole”
The first song the EP includes is titled “Black Hole” and consists of only two verses that are split up by an instrumental interval. The first verse is sung by Baker with Dacus and Bridgers joining in for the chorus. Accordingly, the song was written by Baker, who was inspired by a newspaper headline that her bandmate, Dacus, had shown her. The headline, “Black Hole Creating Stars” stood out to Baker because of the abundance of articles gracing the news about space that portray black holes as solely destroying nature’s beauty, not generating it.
Prior to “Black Hole” being written, the internet joked about making a poem out of the atypical story, for it contradicted what is commonly told about the space abysses. Baker took this as a challenge to write a track surrounding the news update, and thus, the song “Black Hole” was created.
Baker incorporates the news articles holding information about space in the first verse, shown in the lyrics, “You can see the stars, the ones / The headlines said this morning.”
After the beginning verse, the other boygenius members join in, and the change is emphasized through an instrumental build-up between each of them.
With chaotic chords playing, Dacus and Bridgers use play-on-words, repeating certain parts of phrases and using them to lead into the next term. For example, Dacus sings, “White teeth, black light, white tea, brown eyes,” and later, “Good day, good night, good talk, goodbye.”
“Afraid of Heights”
Next, Dacus leads the band on the track “Afraid of Heights.” Contrary to “Black Hole,” which has only two verses, this secondary song flaunts the exquisite lyricism of Dacus and contains fewer instrumental moments than the previous.
The song tells the narrative of someone with a friend who believes that their audacious schemes make them seem dauntless, but, ultimately, just portray them as reckless and irresponsible. This is shown in the first verse when Dacus sings, “You made me climb a cliff at night / You wanted me to jump and I declined / You called me a coward, I replied / ‘I don’t wanna live forever / But I don’t wanna die tonight.’”
Dacus follows up by explaining that the friend is, in reality, afraid of all the things they propose in the outro lines: “You called me a crybaby / But you’re the one who got teary.”
Through the track, Dacus showcases the fears that many face of dying a boring death without having lived a life full of adventure. This makes “Afraid of Heights” a relatable anthem, particularly pertaining to members of younger generations who have the majority of their lives ahead of them.
“Voyager”
In “Voyager,” Bridgers utilizes her astounding lyricism abilities and raw vocals to create a masterpiece of musicality, claiming the spot as my personal favorite off of the release.
Bridgers relates “Voyager” to “Afraid of Heights” when she sings, “Then there are nights you say you don’t remember / When you stepped on the gas and you asked if I’m ready to die.” The line is similar to the theme of the previous track because it exemplifies that her significant other likely acted erratically, thus creating precarious situations.
The song is named after a spaceship, The Voyager 1, which launched in 1977 and had the purpose of gaining knowledge about the farther-out areas of the solar system. Bridgers references a famous picture that the spacecraft captured of Earth near the end of the song as she sings, “Walkin’ alone in the city / Makes me feel like a man on the moon / Every small step I took was so easy / But I never imagined a dot quite as pale or as blue / You took it from me, but I would’ve given it to you.”
Looking outside of the track’s outer-space-related figurative language, the message centers on the feelings after a messy relationship concludes. In the storyline, Bridgers tells of how her lover believed that she would never leave them in the simple line, “You thought I’d never leave and I let you believe you were right.”
“Powers”
In the final track of the EP, “Powers,” the lyrics discuss comic book hero story origins and relate these childhood tales to their current existential concerns. For example, in the first verse, “How did it start? Did I fall into a nuclear reactor? / Crawl out with acid skin or somethin’ worse / A hostile alien ambassador? / Or am I simply another of the universe’s failed experiments?”
The track moves forward to vocalize how the subject came to be where they are today and got their “powers.”
The song echoes the sound of one of the more energetic tracks from the record, “Anti-Curse.” The instrumental beginning maintains a familiar tune to its predecessor and allows for a familiarity with their previous work while also encompassing a more melancholy mood than “Anti-Curse.”
Each track on boygenius’s third compilation relates to the overarching essence of outer space, allowing the tracks to be woven together while still exemplifying the contrasting talents of each band member. Throughout the elegant and thought-provoking lyricism and incredible instrumentals on the rest, boygenius created a work that excellently follows up their spring album and develops their daedal discography.
