Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling Album Review

Flicking embers into daffodils
You didn’t plan to tell me how you feel
You laugh about it like it’s no big deal
Crush the fire underneath your heel

Later on, in “Most Wanted Man,” the moment gets an equally heart-in-mouth denouement, describing the force of Baker’s gaze as “almost vulgar and out of place/Like seeing the moon in the day.” Dacus’ gaze can be just as acute, cutting to the truth of what it is to know someone: “Yeah, you’re smart,” she sings on the title track, “but you’re dumb at heart,” loving praise for any nerd who walls up their goofy core with books. “For Keeps” exists in the same quietly transcendent register as the low-key country hymnals Dacus wrote for Boygenius’ The Record: “If the Devil’s in the details and God is everything/Who’s to say that they are not one and the same? … If the Devil’s in the details/Then God is in the gap in your teeth/You are doing the Lord’s work every time you smile at me.” It’s cute in a good way.

In Liz Pelly’s monumental book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, Secretly Group cofounder Darius Van Armen talks about how the monetization of repeat plays forced the indie label business model to evolve from signing experimental bands like, say, Oneida, to music that would work in the background of coffee shops. It’s academic that Dacus was signed to Matador: Boygenius’ ascension to Interscope, and hers to Geffen, is the ultimate proof of that model. Indies have always fed majors, but there’s never seemed less air between indie and pop than there is now. The songs from Forever Is a Feeling would sit right alongside Gracie Abrams’ singles—or indeed Hozier’s—on a playlist, neither actively adventurous nor brazenly crowd-pleasing.

If there’s anything radical about Forever Is a Feeling, it’s the album’s expression of queer contentment. Dacus’ whole-body lunge toward what she wants, upending her life to close the distance between herself and desire, is a risk that her and Baker’s confirmed “committed relationship” proves is worth taking. Mainstream music has rarely been so overtly queer, but there still aren’t tons of high-profile records about happy endings—about the joyful domesticity of folding your girlfriend’s clothes while she sings “a song I showed you years ago” in the shower, as on closer “Lost Time.”

You could posit that it’s similarly radical to exalt these songs in such finery, much like the gown Dacus wears in Will St. John’s handpainted album artwork: a sort of musical Portrait of a Lady on Fire, all repressed, smoldering desire. But there’s no fire here, let alone soily hallucinogens smeared in armpits; if it’s glory in queer domesticity you want, Perfume Genius has long nailed it with rapture and ambiguity. The album’s tweeness is reminiscent of the cutesy (one could say unthreateningly desexualized) way lesbian culture has been commodified in the mainstream: The Dacus-directed video for “Best Guess,” populated with sweetly line-dancing mascs, butches, trans men, and Cara Delevingne, might be the moment’s Rosetta Stone. Forever Is a Feeling turns the most transcendent, hopeful, horny moments of a young lover’s life into maddeningly safe background music. It’s so frustrating, you could scream.

Lucy Dacus: Forever Is a Feeling