You likely know Lucy Dacus from the power-suit-wearing supergroup Boygenius, which also features Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker. (Their 2023 album The Record won Best Rock Song, Best Rock Performance, and Best Alternative Music Album at last year’s Grammys.) But Dacus, 29, is also a standout artist in her own right—and with her fourth album, Forever Is a Feeling, out today, she takes a significant step forward in both her personal and professional evolution, exploring the pleasures and pains of falling in love with arresting vulnerability.
“Writing about love and sexuality definitely felt new,” Dacus tells me when we speak on the phone in early March. “Part of my childhood was defined by trying to be a good daughter, friend, student, Christian, and girlfriend—essentially, a good person by other people’s standards. I thought embracing my own sense of self would distract from that goal, or acknowledging my desires would throw chaos into it. In hindsight, I realize it was manipulative to people-please to that extent. You should act from a place of altruism and let others decide if they want you in their life.”
In fact, Forever Is a Feeling’s opening track, “Big Deal,” is about just such a decision, recounting the mildly harrowing moment when a close friend confessed their romantic feelings for Dacus.
Her instinct, at first, was to “brush it off, saying, ‘That’s amazing, but let’s never talk about this again. You’re a big deal to me, but we can’t touch this,’” Dacus says now. “Avoiding things like that has been a big part of who I am—trying to control or selectively manage my emotions and how I respond to others’ feelings.” But learning to let go and just let it happen—or, as Dacus puts it, “feeling deeply, resisting change, and then ultimately surrendering to love”—would give the album its arc, even if it took her a while to understand what was happening. “I write all the time, in pieces—sometimes just two lines, other times 10 lines, or even a whole song,” she says. “I often don’t realize there’s an album until a theme emerges.”
With Forever Is a Feeling, the through line was love, and the songs ended “on a positive note because, thankfully, my life has also ended up in a good place.” (Dacus recently revealed that she and Baker are in a committed relationship.)
The music itself is as rangy as the narrative. Where a song like “Limerence,” with its lilting melody and ruminative tone, is almost hypnotic in its beauty, the more upbeat “Best Guess” has Dacus crooning about the uncertainties of a blossoming relationship over jangly guitars and a steady drumbeat.
Another standout, “Bullseye,” features Hozier, whom Dacus met when he performed with Boygenius in Boston in 2023. It’s typical of Dacus to let one project flow into the next: “As soon as I release a record, I start thinking about the next one,” she says. “I don’t want to stop writing and recording for too long—it’s like a muscle I’ve never had to work out because it’s always in use. If I stop for too long, I worry I’ll forget how to do it.”
When it came to the album’s cover, Dacus knew she wanted “a real, handmade piece of art”—a corrective to the deluge of digital imagery filling our feeds. What she landed on was an oil portrait by Will St. John, depicting Dacus, saintlike, with her eyes downturned and heavy gold cloth draped around her shoulders. St. John’s classical style, recalling the Old Masters, “is rooted in an older standard of beauty,” Dacus says, “which fits me more than today’s beauty standards—people have compared my appearance to Venus or a porcelain doll rather than the Instagram face we’re so used to seeing in the media.” (It also represents, she notes, “the first time I put my own face front and center on an album cover”—fitting for such an unflinchingly personal body of work.)
The album’s title, which appears across Dacus’s chest, was drawn onto her actual skin in eyeliner by tattoo artist Nicole Jaclyn Smith for the painting’s reference photo. This was a metaphor of sorts, following from the idea that to love someone “forever” is impossible; the best people can do is simply keep choosing each other. “The tattoo was another way of referencing the idea that ‘forever is a feeling,’ because it isn’t real,” Dacus explains. And besides, she adds, “I have friends who argue that tattoos are actually one of the shortest-lived forms of art because they disappear with us.”
She wants just the opposite for the record. “I hope this music speaks for itself—whether or not people hear my explanations or intentions,” Dacus says. “My dream is that people remember the music and forget me.”
