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Tyler: Travis, having taken a look at one of your favorites from 2023, The Tubs’ Dead Meat, we’re here but a week later to break down one of mine.  boygenius’ stellar the record kicked off a year of success for the “indie” trio that led to, amongst other achievements, a show at Madison Square Garden, as well as three Grammys.

boygenius are a group comprised of noted musicians Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus.  Of the three, Bridgers had ascended to the most fame in the years between the 2018 EP boygenius and the record.  Her second album, 2020’s Punisher, amplified her following and led to a performance on Saturday Night Live that I know you’ll want to rave about. 

Personally, I came to Bridgers through, at first, her inclusion in the New York Times expose of Ryan Adams that you and I recently discussed.  That placed her on my radar, and so I gave Punisher a shot in those strange early-pandemic days.  I took to it, so much so that I wound up catching a Bridgers concert when she finally toured behind the album.  Dacus, I’d actually seen on a date, but we left early through no fault of the artist.  Baker was unknown to me until boygenius.

I thought that was a damn exceptional EP.  I think the record is a more-than-worthy follow-up.  How about you, my fellow cisgender heterosexual white male compatriot?

Travis: Overall, my feelings on the record are positive. To acknowledge the big old elephant in the room, yes, we’re both cisgender heterosexual white males and thus perhaps not the target audience for this album, which is fine by me. I have to say, just from listening to it, I’d never specifically get that impression, but media and social media coverage have provided it plenty. And I’m sure social media/media/terminally online vibes will probably wind up being part of this discussion, especially when it comes to the most famous member of this trio.

Before boygenius I was also familiar with Bridgers and had heard of Julien Baker but never listened to any of her music. Lucy Dacus wasn’t a familiar name. I enjoyed Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps and later on found Punisher to be hit-or-miss, but the songs I did like on it I liked a lot. I also was a pretty big fan of Bridgers’ collaboration with erstwhile Bright Eye Conor Oberst on Better Oblivion Community Center, though at this point I only ever listen to one song from that album. I know I listened to the first boygenius EP but I definitely couldn’t pick any of its songs out of a lineup at this point. I think, even with time and distance, I will be able to pick a few from the record out of a lineup, and even if the album itself doesn’t have staying power for me (it might, it’s hard to say) I’d say four tracks from it probably will.

And in an nod back to our discussion of Ryan Adams’s Cold Roses, I think it’s pretty great that Phoebe Bridgers, perhaps now the most prominent of his victims, is flourishing while he is smelling his own farts in the studio he owns and making album after album of bitter, tinny-sounding garbage.

I did have a bit of a chuckle at your quote marks on “indie” because man this is not an indie album in any sense of the word, and it’s pretty annoying how “indie” became codified as a genre (one that I think can best be explained aesthetically as “The Garden State Soundtrack”) and not a simple descriptor for music that is released on independent label without a codified artistic rubric.

This is a major label album and sounds like one. Musically, it sounds like one from like 1993, when the majors were signing every band that had ever once had a college radio hit and putting out high-budget affairs trying to find the next Nirvana. The production is more modern than that, but the general sound and vibe gives me MTV’s Buzz Bin circa the time when Kennedy hosted Alternative Nation.

Tyler: Fucking Kennedy.

Travis: In my huge wall of text I’ve given us a lot of ways we can dig in to talk about the album. As it’s your pick, I’d love you to lead the way. I have thoughts, and they are many.

Tyler: Well, I would care to declare that “Not Strong Enough,” with its clear lyrical callback to a Sheryl Crow hit from the mid-‘90s, is the record’s best track by a leap or two.  I like a whole lot of what we have here on the album, and I love quite a bit of it.  “Not Strong Enough,” though, is one of the special songs where everything comes together and just glows.  It’s irresistible.

Travis: Yeah that was my pick for the best track, also by considerable margin. It is a hit now, it would be a hit in any era. It feels timeless. It rules.

Note on this (and our first bit of “terminally online”): Barack Obama included it on his Summer Playlist. Lucy Dacus tweeted out that Barack Obama is a war criminal. I don’t disagree, Lucy. It’s pretty funny how as soon as he was no longer president, too, people would be asking his opinion about massive global issues and his response is to be like “…I like Mitski.”

Tyler: Maybe when Trump wins this year, he’ll find a way to abolish term limits and set up Obama-Trump ‘28.

Travis: Is that Trump vs. Obama in 2028? Or a Trump-Obama ticket in 2028? I guess either would be some sort of harbinger of doom.

Tyler: Trump vs. Obama. IS ON.

Travis: Anyway, as I mentioned earlier, there are a few songs on the album I’m sure will stick with me even if the album doesn’t, and “Not Strong Enough” is at the top of that list.

Tyler: There are a couple of solid tunes here that I find marred by my knowledge of their inspiration.  I read the origins of both “Leonard Cohen”—really great tune—and “We’re In Love”—a song my youthful maudlin virginal self would have really felt, and each song is a bit lessened by the awareness.  Normally, this doesn’t occur for me.  I’m curious about where a song comes from, who inspires it.  I guess I just didn’t like the answers to my questions this time around.

Travis: Ah, I haven’t looked much into the origins of what any of these songs are about. I kind of know I don’t want to know, at least in the case of anything Bridgers took the lead on. The past few years she’s, through some fault of her own, and through some fault of internet fandom, become a profoundly overexposed presence in the corners of the internet I frequent, and most things I learn about her and see her say or tweet make me like her less. 

You know how whenever there’s an award show performance that goes viral (most recently, Tracy Chapman showing up to kill it on the Grammys), the camera cuts to Taylor Swift being the only person standing up singing along completely unable to let a moment pass by without being the center of attention? That’s the vibe I get, rightly or wrongly, from Phoebe Bridgers, and have gotten since the lamest guitar smashing in the history of musical performance.

On the other hand, these other songs rule and I will continue to listen to them no matter what thing Phoebe Bridgers does I find annoying: “Satanist,” “Anti-Curse,” “$20” and, depending on how I’m feeling that day about Lucy Dacus’s vocal affectations, “True Blue.”

Tyler: The moment when Baker unleashes her voice in “Anti-Curse” is probably my favorite not-“Not Strong Enough” moment on the whole album.

“True Blue,” I dig a lot, too.  A really sweet ode to friendship, at least to my ears.

Travis: Something I concluded from listening to this album a lot in prep for this discussion: I probably need to listen to Julien Baker. From the songs she takes lead on, I’m guessing she hews most closely to my general musical sensibilities. Also her voice sounds cool and she’s got a good scream.

Tyler: She can absolutely shred on guitar.  There’s a boygenius performance dating to the release of the EP, available somewhere on YouTube, where Bridgers and Dacus play-bow to Baker as she destroys a solo.

Baker’s debut, Sprained Ankle, is a damn fine album.

Travis: I’ll definitely check it out.

Tyler: I’d say my top Bridgers contribution to the record is the final track, “Letter To An Old Poet.”  That’s a hell of a takedown right there.

Travis: I have no feelings either way on “Letter to an Old Poet.” I don’t know what it’s a takedown of, because it, like a couple of other songs, entirely slips my mind even as I’m listening. Like, I sit down with intention to listen to these albums when we’re going to talk about them, and it, “We’re in Love” and “Cool About It” are like dead zones in time for me. I could tell you nothing about them.

That’s not to be glib, it’s just to be honest. It’s that, and some of the production choices, that keep this from being an unqualified full-throated recommendation from me.

Tyler: I’m not big on “We’re In Love.”  “Cool About It” works for me because of the harmonies.  I am an unabashed fan of how these three sound when they sing together.

Along with “Love,” my least favorite here is probably “Emily I’m Sorry.”  For some reason that one doesn’t grab me.

Travis: They do harmonize well. I didn’t particularly like “Emily I’m Sorry” due to the production, but the harmonies almost save it for me. Speaking of: it’s not there on every song, and on the harder rocking numbers the guitar crunch cuts through it, but that smeary muddled modern pop production style is a true bummer. It turns everything it touches into music to be heard when walking through the shoppes (must be spelled “shoppes”) between the hotel room and the casino anywhere on the Las Vegas Strip. Let guitars sound like guitars and drums like drums. I blame Jack Antonoff.

When I said earlier it sounded, if not for the production, like this could have come out in 1993. Probably would have sounded better to my ears if it did.

Maybe I’m being kinda-old-man-yells-at-cloud. But I don’t think that production style will age well.

Tyler: Was there an uproar amongst misbegotten rock critics about the affectionate shot at Leonard Cohen in “Leonard Cohen?”

Travis: I don’t know. I don’t think I read any rock critics who would opine on such things. I get enough Springsteen overpraise from sportswriters.

j/k I love you Bruce, you are indeed the Boss. I just wish sportswriters would listen to a second artist.

Tyler: They listen to Jason Isbell.

Travis: Of course they do.

I had and have many thoughts about the hit album the record from boygenius, and I think I’ve expressed them all. I’d give it a solid 3.5/5 in the review accompanying the cover story in Blender that would have an uncomfortably sexy picture of the three of them on the front.

Tyler: “Modern Rock’s Most Powerful Threesome.”

Fucking Blender.

Travis: One of them would be barefoot.

No wonder people hate white heterosexual cisgender men. We’re scum.

Tyler: Yeah, we’re not great.