It’s a question Lucy Dacus is unafraid to ask over and over on her nuanced fourth album, Forever Is a Feeling, which takes a refreshingly realistic view on romance. There are no Olivia Rodrigo-style takedowns of misbehaving exes to be found here – instead Dacus lets them wander back into her life “like the moon in the day”, or insists to them their erstwhile love affair was in fact “a big deal”. As for the lovers, they are merely a “best guess for the future”, unaware of Dacus’s intrusive thoughts of breaking their heart just to be done with it all.
Alas, Dacus has never been a songwriter to make straightforward pop. Her breakout hit ‘Night Shift’ proved that, her comforting tenor melodies eventually soaring skywards amidst the finale’s unexpected jolt of noise rock. Her last album, Home Video, doubled down on these stylistic switchbacks (see: ‘VBS’’s five seconds of thrash metal) but at the expense of hooks, with Dacus’s band spending a lot of time cruising at a steady indie rock chug. These days Dacus is best known as one third of the supergroup boygenius with Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers, and fans will no doubt pore over Forever Is a Feeling’s love songs for references to Baker, who Dacus recently confirmed she was dating.
Forever Is a Feeling feels more earthy and down-to-earth by comparison to Home Video, with a wealth of refreshing contemporary classical touches. The opening track’s shards of layered violins could almost be a Shostakovich piece, whilst ‘Come Out’ is blessed with a shimmering harp, and ‘Limerence’’s pianistic snow flurries are practically Debussian. On this track in particular Dacus’s vocals are as exquisite, quite at ease teasing out a long, delicate vibrato in this crystalline ballad played out in slow motion.
Nonetheless, Dacus’s main draw remains her lyricism. She is a keen student of love and relationships, and Forever Is a Feeling ends up sounding like a Sally Rooney novel in album form, full of romance on the brink and deep-seated desires not quite realised. In particular, she’s interested in honest conversation as the ultimate form of intimacy – ‘Ankles’ asks if romance can be built on words alone (if the lustful chorus is anything to go by, the answer is no), whilst ‘Big Deal’ muses on the way unspoken fears about a partner inevitably “come up to the surface in the end”. Most compelling is ‘Talk’, which sees Dacus dissect the ugly end of a relationship to the sound of overblown drums and thorny electric guitars. Yes, Dacus has written plenty of pretty acoustic ballads, but this is a reminder that she can still dig into some gritty distortion when the song demands it.
Musically, Dacus really hits her stride in this record’s second half. ‘Best Guess’ is operates at a thoroughly lovely Americana lilt and features one of Dacus’s strongest choruses yet, refreshingly reluctant to label a lover as anything more than a “best bet for the future”. Appealingly scratchy ‘Most Wanted Man’ is road trip-ready country rock, whilst ‘Bullseye’ drafts in Hozier for the role of misunderstood boyfriend. In the end, it’s all just a warm-up for the spectacular closing track, ‘Lost Time’. “I love you, and every day that I knew and didn’t say is lost time,” Dacus admits heartbreakingly, as the guitar and piano steadily swell to a theatrical climax. And what a climax, signalled by a gut punch of a drum entry that will have you punching the air and bawling your eyes out at the same time. It’s a cinematic tragedy, and one of the songs of Dacus’s career.
It’s a shame Dacus’s writing isn’t always so sharp. ‘Modigliani’ is typically well-read (the title is a reference to the early 20th century Italian sculptor, of course) but feels like little more than journal jottings in pretty packaging, whilst Dacus writes herself in circles with ‘Bullseye’’s long-winded explanation of love locks. Still, when at her best, there are few songwriters who can tackle the lived complexities of love quite as ably as Dacus can. “I used to think that’d be the worst / To grow old and run out of words,” Dacus tells us during the quaint waltz ‘Come Out’. “Now I have seen some incredible things I could never describe if I tried.” Of course, there’s plenty about the nuances of love that will always defy description but, to take a leaf out of ‘Best Guess’’s restrained playbook, this album is a decent attempt.