The Rest: not just a shadow of The Record.
In just four songs on The Rest, Boygenius takes in the unimportant, the heart-breaking, and the sublime.
If you’re a fan of “sad girl” indie rock or, as of this Saturday, SNL, you have probably heard of Boygenius, a singer-songwriter supergroup comprised of Lucy Dacus, Julien Baker, and Phoebe Bridgers—The Boys. In March 2023, Boygenius released The Record, an album that is now up for six Grammy nominations, including Album of the Year. Six months later, after a national tour, topping charts internationally, and multiple late-night show appearances, the group released a companion piece to The Record, a four-song EP called The Rest. Whether being named Men of the Year or dancing in red undies as Troye Sivan sleep demons on SNL, Boygenius is going seamlessly mainstream without compromising their collaboration and delicate lyrics that make us cry and make The Rest a complement to, rather than a shadow of, The Record.
The Rest is riddled with sonic callbacks and lyrical motifs from The Record. The “Oh”s and “Mm”s of “Voyager” are taken directly from “Revolution 0.” “Powers” and “Anti-Curse” both begin with a quick-tempo guitar strumming. But The Rest differs on a collaborative level. Where The Record is stock-full of three-part doubling harmonies and sharing verses, leaving each song feeling as if each Boy has had a pen to it, the songs on The Rest are individualized but supported by the bands’ other members. Though The Rest may feel sonically similar to The Record upon first listen, it is entirely its own body: A collaborative piece that highlights each member's unique ability to capture the sublime, carrying us between rainstorms and nuclear reactors, “days spent tangled up together” and “[cliffs] at night.”
“Black Hole”
The EP begins with Baker’s vocals backtracked by only piano in “Black Hole.” It’s a fitting introduction to the EP. When Baker says, “In a rainstorm/Suckin’ down a dart on the back porch/Out here, it gets so dark,” there is a sense of admiration for moments of shrouded and darkened silence, mirroring the EP’s cover where Bridgers, Dacus, and Baker stand framed in a silhouette, a cloudy sky throwing dark blues and purples onto the water behind them. Over a short piano riff, the drums and electric guitar pick up as Dacus ends “Black Hole” with a verse supported by Bridgers’ lower harmony. Bridgers, the most well-known of the group, pulls back to support Dacus and Baker, her periphery hand in the song emblematic of the collaboration and mutual respect embedded in this EP. Where Baker’s verse feels like a running thought of pensive loneliness, Dacus is stuck, cycling through lists in an anxious attempt to understand her separation from the “you.”
“Black Hole” exemplifies what Boygenius does best. In the absence of classical song structure—two verses, three choruses, and a bridge—Boygenius utilizes a stripped-down beginning and a harmony-ridden second verse to build the song from a slowly unwinding story, leaving listeners fulfilled. The group’s simplistic yet poetic lyrics that cut straight to the gut are also on display. When Dacus says “It’s out of your hands, but have a safe flight,” she doesn’t need superfluous language to convey her care, worry, and lack of control. We’ve all said it before, and so we all immediately understand the helpless but caring gesture of wishing someone a safe flight. “Black Hole” makes sense at the top of the EP as its most collaborative song and an introduction to the oncoming themes of solitude and meditative silence.
Favorite lyric: “Bad boy, big fight, you’re a good guy” or “It’s out of your hands, but have a safe flight”
“Afraid of Heights”
“Afraid of Heights” is Dacus’ song. The most classically structured song on the EP, it is an emotional listen that follows the narrator up cliffs and cranes and down into the muddy water of teacups and relationships with reckless explorers. This song could tuck easily into Dacus’ 2021 album, Home Video, with its themes of naivete-plagued relationships and overconfident accomplices who figure they know more like the protagonist of “Brando.” The lyrics are classic Dacus too. We’re listening to her tell us a story, slipping from prosaic relationship-building to short and sweet sentences. Both “One man’s dream is another man’s death” and “You called me a crybaby/But you’re the one who got teary” project listeners into the headspace of Dacus’ “you” and the tense relationship between the two. So this is Dacus’ song, and yet it is harmonically shared with Baker and Bridgers, who consistently return for a three-part harmony on each of the choruses.
Favorite lyric: “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”
Beginning with five seconds of silence, “Voyager” is a Bridgers-heavy song that could tuck perfectly into any space that she inhabits. The song begins as The Record’s “Revolution 0” does with a set of four “Mm”s. In her verse in “Cool About It,” Bridgers sings, “Once I took your medication to know what it’s like/and now I have to act like I can’t read your mind,” calling forward to “And sometimes you let me read your mind” in “Voyager.” And most obviously, Bridgers concludes “Voyager” with “You took [the moon] from me, but I would’ve given it to you,” a callback to “Moon Song,” where Bridgers pleads, “If I could give you the moon, I would give you the moon.” Bridgers consistently returns to these images of astral projection and astronomy, but in “Voyager” she does it with a sense of neutral wondering that is ultimately just as heart-breaking in its reflection.
Moreover, “Voyager” fits brilliantly into the “Me & My Dog”–“Letter to an Old Poet” saga, but embodies a different sense of closure. Where “Me & My Dog” details an initial breakup and its toxicity, “Letter to an Old Poet” is wrought with emotional reclamation of power and self, leaving Bridgers to sit silently with everything after in “Voyager.” In the final verse, Bridgers is “walkin’ alone in the city/[feeling] like a man on the moon,” simultaneously alone and accompanied by Dacus and Baker, who never double one of Bridgers’ lines but hold her in soft “Oh”s and “Mm”s as she finally finds a place to land.
“Voyager” could be anywhere, but it is here on The Rest without “Cool About It”s camaraderie, “Revolution 0”’s doubling harmonies, and “Moon Song”’s regret. And while it's the Boys' most callback-heavy song, it still feels unique, letting Bridgers reinterpret the words she’s sung a hundred times before and making us emotional (and me a little teary) when we feel her jump for closure and find it not just in herself but in Dacus and Baker as well.
Favorite lyric: “You thought I’d never leave and I let you believe you were right”
“Powers”
The quick introductory strums in “Powers”—The Rest’s closing track—promise a Baker song. It’s a superhero origin story that plagues the narrator with confusion and guilt as Baker scavenges her mind, her skin, and inevitably the universe for a better sense of self and inception. As Dacus and Bridgers come in to double Baker with building harmonies, Baker’s exploration goes from personal to collective, with the final lines of the song, “The force of our impact, the fission/The hum of our contact, the sound of our collisions.”
As The Boys finish, horns enter and hard strums turn into guitar plucks; you can hear Baker’s fingers sliding across the neck of the guitar from fret to fret. We are carried gently from the shore, the water finally pulling us in as we take in the unimportant, the life-changing, and the sublime that The Boys have laid out for us in only the last twelve minutes and six seconds. Each member has had their song, their moment of reckoning. We’ve heard the musical and symbolic motifs. We’ve heard reinterpretations of reckless car rides and naive lovers. And ultimately, we’ve stumbled upon the end of The Rest: a complement to The Record, a representation of Boygenius’ respect for each other’s artistry, and a journey of taking in the sublime and doing it together.
Favorite lyric: “Just a light in the tunnel and whatever gets scattered/Life flashin’ before the eye of whatever comes after”
edited by Aidan Burt.
album artwork believed to belong to either the publisher of the work or the artist.