Indie supergroup boygenius, made up of singer-songwriters Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus, released their follow up EP to their critically acclaimed debut album “The Record,” titled “The Rest,” on Friday.
The EP is made up of four originally unreleased secret songs the group revealed on different tour dates.
“The Rest,” feels like a tribute to the group and its friendship with the work they’ve done together, with callbacks to each of their own respective solo works and their work as a group together.
Filled with references to the cosmos, boygenius does the work of bringing an otherworldly and ethereal spirit to issues that feel opposite to one another.
The EP reasserts boygenius’ triumph year of 2023, capping off their tour with a surprise release of songs that add a deeper look into their previous release for fans.
“Black Hole”
At a live in-store performance in Long Beach, Julien Baker said inspiration for the song came from co-member Lucy Dacus when she read about black holes creating stars, rather than destroying them.
The song is a callback to the track “Not Strong Enough” from “The Record.”
“Black hole opened in the kitchen / Every clock's a different time / It would only take the energy to fix it / I don't know why I am”
The song is a symbol for not being emotionally strong enough for your partner, to not be able to take on the dealings of a relationship and for not being able to be the partner you want to be.
“Black Hole,” however, shows the potential in creating something deep with someone else.
“You can see the stars, the ones / The headlines said this morning / Were being spat out / By what we thought / Was just destroying everything for good.”
I love when artists reference their past work, making connections you wouldn’t see or hear otherwise, coming full circle with their songs.
It’s a perfect start to the otherwise short EP, calling to the cosmos to help figure out our lives and relationships. An apt way to connect us back to the vast universe we’re all a part of.
“Afraid of Heights”
All of the songs Lucy Dacus is the lead for are the ones I think of as the highlights of all of boygenius’ work.
After we hope for potential in “Black Hole,” Dacus takes on a more skeptical and cautious approach.
“I know that I fucked up when I / Told you I'm afraid of heights / It made you wanna test my courage / 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 explained at the same live-performance in Long Beach that the song was about friends who think they're radical, but ultimately are just reckless and trying to ruin their lives.
This song made me feel good in the sense that I’ve always been a low-key scaredy cat. Taking risks sometimes, most of the time, freaks me out.
As I listened to the lyrics I couldn’t help but think of the time I jumped off a cliff into cold lake water at the insistence of my friends.
While I made it in, I definitely couldn’t help but think how scary the feeling of jumping into something you don’t fully trust.
“I've never smoked a cigarette / I wanna live a vibrant life / But I wanna die a boring death / I know I was a disappointment / Know you wanted me to take a risk / Not everybody gets the chance to live / A life that isn't dangerous.”
Dacus is a writer to her core. She knows how to use her lyrics to catch and grab your attention while your mind gets lost in the melody of the song.
Her lyrics pull you back up to the surface to make sure you’re hearing what she’s telling you.
Still, even with her cautious approach in her writing, the song still reminds you of hope.
“When the black water ate you up / Like a sugar cube in a teacup / I got the point you were makin' / When I held my breath 'til you came up.”
“Voyager”
I love when Phoebe Bridgers sings about the moon.
A recurring theme in her music, Bridgers utilizes the moon and space in “Voyager,” named after the spacecraft Voyager 1, which took the most iconic photo of the Earth in “Pale Blue Dot.”
“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.”
The “Pale Blue Dot” is in reference to astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who insisted NASA commission the photo of Earth taken by Voyager 1, according to the Planetary Society.
The lyrics call back to her 2020 song “Moon Song,” where she sings about how she would do anything for her partner, even the impossible task of giving them the moon.
Bridgers, just like the rest of boygenius, is a master of callbacks and references, sprinkling in allegories of time and space.
They remind us that while our problems may seem huge to us, in the infinity of the universe, it’s nothing but a pale blue dot.
“powers”
Julien Baker leads the trio in the ending track, using tropes from comic books and various scientific reactions as more allegories to her own origin story.
“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?”
Get ready to get existential when you listen to Julien Baker, because it definitely had me sitting in bed pondering my existence in the universe.
Baker invokes the unknown forces of the universe that rule our lives.
If our planet wasn’t the perfect amount of distance from the sun, if our atmosphere wasn’t just right or if we were an inch closer to the sun, would we be here? Worrying about the daily issues of life?
“The tail of a comet burned up in an instant, the destruction of matter / There's no object to be seen in the supercollider / Just a light in the tunnel and whatever gets scattered / Life flashin' before the eye of whatever comes after / The force of our impact, the fission / The hum of our contact, the sound of our collisions”
It’s a stark reminder that the universe we live in can be a metaphor for transformation and moving forward - which is really part of the metaphysics of the universe, it brought us to Earth and somehow, keeps us here in a brief moment.
We as humans are capable of profound transformation and growth. Perhaps we ourselves are metaphor of the change the universe constantly is, chaotically bringing about above us with every blink we take.
boygenius reminds us of the relationship between ourselves and the universe that surrounds us.
